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LIFE 4 APR 
IN THE ee 


STUDIES IN THE EPISTLES 


BY 


Rev. J. H. JOWETT, c.u., vo. 





BIBLE HOUSE 
THE CHRISTIAN HERALD 
NEW YORK 


COPYRIGHT, 1925, 
BY GRORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


I BELIEVING IS SEEING : : t ‘ ee 
II PRAYER ANSWERED, BUT! ; aha aenaa OREN EE 
III LET US HAVE PEACE . : : : H 1s a7 
IV THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS . ) : Suk sao 
V TALKING AND WALKING . Wide ‘ Cinta 
41) ‘AN EMANCIPATED: SOUT) (oy « dicey igs deueut) caaheO 
VII HIDDEN BUT NOT SEPARATE. : : panes 19 
vt THE WINNING SPIRIT. ; , ; Cd ees 
Pee) POSSESSIVE: BATTED esi widuiia aah) eesaee gee ok ited 
X THE ARISTOCRACY OF PASSIONATE SOULS . 46 
XI THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT . ; 4 , or 49 
XII UNTO THE LORD : ; : A é A IN Pe 
XIII THE ARRESTING WITNESS OF HOPE... hye ROD 
XIV ORGANS OF HUMANITY . ; ‘ : ayy 0 
XV HARD-HEADED . : ‘ , 4 ns oy yg Oo 
XVI MORE MAN! . ; ; , , , . 66 


vi 


XXXVI 


CONTENTS © 
THE TRANSMISSION OF BLESSINGS ° 
EARTHEN VESSELS . : . . 
SIGHT AND INSIGHT . ° ° ° 
THE INCLUSIVE SACRIFICE . . ° 
THE KINDLING MINISTRY OF ZEAL . 
THE LORDLY GRACE OF GIVING . . 
COUNTERFEIT VIRTUE . . ° 
THE UNSPEAKABLE SECRET ° : 
THE THORN THAT REMAINED . ° 


THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS . . 


THE MYSTIC CONTROL OF THE JOURNEY . 


THE SCHOOL OF GENTLENESS 


CRUCIFIED BY NEGLECT ° ° ° 


THE UNTRAVERSED CONTINENTS 


WHICH IS HIS BODY . ° . ° 


THE MIDDLE WALL 


THE GREAT COMPANION AND HIS HOUSE 


INCAPABLE OF FEELING 


THE WATCHFUL USE OF OPPORTUNITY 


VOCAL THERAPY . : ° . . 


PAGH 


102 
105 
108 
113 
116 
120 
124 
130 
134 
136 


LVI 


CONTENTS 
FAKING ONE’S STAND sietins 
THE GRACE OF READINESS. .. 
BENHFICENT RESISTANCES yay hee 
THE CONTAGION OF HEALTH .  .. 
THE RESOURCES OF A GREAT APOSTLE 
NOT SCARED! . 
THE CAPACITY FOR SYMPATHY 
ENERGETIC CHARACTER .  . le 
REPUDIATED ESTATES j 
DRAWING A CROSS. . 
THE DISTANT SCENE AND THE NEXT STEP 
THE TEST OF TENDENCY. . .. . 
THE PATRIOTISM OF THE SOUL. . 
THE KNIGHTS OF THE RED CROSS .. 
THE WITNESS OF DIFFICULT ENTERPRISE 
A GARDEN IN THEGLOOM. .. 
THE PLACE OF UNVEILING 
THE POWER OF DARKNESS. . . . 
SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE. . .  . 


LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS . . ° : 


CONTENTS 

UNLEARNING THINGS . : . ; 
THE INDWELLING WORD. : ; 
SPIRITUAL DISTINCTION ; 
THE GIFT OF SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT 
WIND AND SAIL . k ; ; : 
THE PATTERN INTHE MOUNT .. 
OUR VOICE fiers DEATH. , 
GOD’S ENJOYMENT OF HIS CHILDREN . 
THE GREAT VENTURES . : : : 
PUTTING OUT ANTAGONISTIC FIRES . 
WITNESSES WHO GIVE EVIDENCE . : 
THE LORD’S CHASTENING 


ROAD-MAKERS e ° ° ° e 


263 


LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 





I 
BELIEVING IS SEEING 


‘‘He staggered not... through unbelief.’’ 
Rom. iv. 20. 


THE divine promise had been given. ‘There 
could be no doubt about that. But there 
were no external helps to make the soul cer- 
tain of its fulfilment. The promise had no 
friends in the outer circumstances. The 
face of everything frowned upon it. Com- 
mon experience was against it. Common 
sense was against it. And yet Abraham 
‘‘staggered not’’! He steadied himself on 
the promise. His soul nested in the divine 
purpose. He dwelt in the secret place of 
the Most High. By faith he companioned 
with friendly realities when every hard and 
glaring event appeared to be his foe. For 
faith is a finer sense even than common 
sense. Common sense, when it is despoiled 
of faith, is a very local and deceitful sight. 
But seeing is believing! Nothing of the 
11 


12 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


kind. Believing is the only true seeing! 
‘¢Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldest 
believe, thou shouldest see... 2’ ‘‘He 
endured as seeing Him who is invisible.”’ 

And we, too, have to trudge over roads 
where circumstances just shriek against our 
creeds. We have heard the divine word, 
but the ‘‘not likely’’ stares upon us on every 
side. And common sense is very aggressive, 
and it rears itself against the promise of 
our God. And the gathered wisdom of the 
world obtrudes itself against the hidden 
wisdom of the Lord. Our material setting 
is unfriendly. Carnal forces are ironical in 
their easy triumph. And we begin to look 
foolish in our simple faith. And, God help 
us! sometimes we begin to feel foolish, and 
we are tempted to make obeisance to the 
kingdom of the apparent, and to bow down 
and worship it. 

Never was there greater need of deep- 
living men and women who will confront the 
proud and massed ‘‘unlikelies’’ with the 
spoken promise of our God. Never was the 
need more urgent that we should confirm 
ourselves in the promise amid the uncom- 
fortable irony of circumstances, and the 


BELIEVING IS SEEING 13 


loud and blatant taunt of our foes. We 
must wear the word of the Lord like an ath- 
lete’s belt! ‘‘Having your loins girt about 
with truth!’’ These are the men and women 
who remain victors on the field at the end 
of the long and bloody day. At the begin- 
ning of day theirs is the faith which gives 
substance to things hoped for; at the end of 
the day the things hoped for have become 
their eternal possession. 


II 
PRAYER ANSWERED, BUT! 


‘‘Making request that . . . I might come unto you.’’ 
Rom. i. 10. 


THe Apostle Paul had a great longing to 
visit Rome. He coveted the privilege of 
preaching the Gospel in the metropolis of 
the world. From Rome the story of grace 
might be radiated along the great highways 
to the ends of the earth. ‘‘After that I 
must visit Rome.’’ ‘‘I am ready to preach 
the Gospel to you that are in Rome also!’’ 
And so he prayed that his burning desire 
might be granted. And his prayer was an- 
swered, but in such a startlingly unexpected 
way. ‘‘When we came to Rome the cen- 
turion delivered the prisoners,’’ and Paul 
was among them! He hoped to enter the 
Imperial city an ambassador in glorious 
freedom; he entered it in bonds. 

And so the prayer was answered, but it 


was answered in a very surprising way. 
14 


PRAYER ANSWERED, BUT! 15 


The Apostle arrived in Rome, but such an 
arrival had never entered into his dreams. 
He was a prisoner in bonds, but the word of 
God was not bound; and I suppose that if 
Paul had never been taken to Rome we 
should never have had the epistles of the 
eaptivity. The Epistle to the Philippians, 
with all its mellow maturity of spiritual 
fruits, was born in bondage. And Colos- 
sians, with its glorious proclamation of the 
sole headship and mediatorship of Jesus 
Christ, was born in the same gloomy servi- 
tude. And what rare treasures there are in 
these and other letters, which we might never 
have known had the inspired writer always 
been free! ‘‘In my distress Thou hast en- 
larged me.’’ The experience of the Psalmist 
was surely the experience of the Apostle, and 
we enjoy the splendid fruit of his enlarge- 
ment. Paul entered Rome in bonds, but in 
his bondage he sent forth letters which have 
enriched the world with infinite blessedness. 

So that God may answer our prayers, but 
the answer may come in a quite extraordi- 
nary way. We get where we desire to be, but 
by God’s own path. It might seem as 
though it would have been better for every- 


16 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


body if Paul had been in Rome and also been 
perfectly free. Yes, but I am not so sure 
that we should have had those immortal let- 
ters. What a life Paul would have lived had 
he been free to do whatever he pleased, and 
to go wherever he liked! It is notorious 
that when a man is made a bishop his days 
become so crowded that it is a rare thing 
for him to produce his greatest books! And 
who knows but that if this great Apostle 
had had more temporary freedom we might 
have had less permanent fruit. Sometimes 
the Lord permits our seclusion in order that 
we may do a larger work. His merciful 
sight has long range, and that is why our im- 
mediate circumstances are often so contra- 
dictory to our aspiration and prayer. The 
Lord looks beyond the temporary bondage 
to the ultimate freedom. 


‘‘The bud may have a bitter taste, 
But sweet will be the flower.’’ 


Tit 


LET US HAVE PEACE 


‘Therefore, being justified by faith, let us have 
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’’ 
Rom. v. 1. 


T'HIs initial word ‘‘therefore’’ sends us back 
to the earlier part of the apostle’s letter. 
We cannot leap into the course of the letter 
at any place we please and disregard every 
other part of the journey. We must accom- 
pany the apostle the whole length of the 
road. It is of the first importance that we 
not only arrive at the right places, but that 
we arrive there by the right approach. The 
approach is an essential factor in the mys- 
tery of revelation. There 1s a way of ap- 
proaching Jerusalem which lays it out be- 
fore you in fascinating perspective and pro- 
portion. There are poems whose worth is 
only betrayed by the right approach. There 
are two or three poems of Francis Thomp- 
son which only begin to live as you come 


upon them through certain queer, dingy 
17 


18 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


windings in his life. But it is probable that 
this sort of reasoning applies to everything, 
and that for everything there is ‘‘a way’’ of 
understanding. 

What, then, is the approach suggested by 
this retrospective word ‘‘therefore’’? Let 
us look back over the road already trav- 
ersed. It began in a grim, dismal, depres- 
sing waste of sin, a waste from which there 
was no way out. Itis almost Dantean in the 
completeness of its bondage and misery. 
Everybody has lost his righteousness, and 
everybody has lost his power to recapture it. 
Many devices are tried, and many, many at- 
tempts are made to escape, but all struggles 
are ineffective. The spiritual landscape re- 
vealed in the early part of this letter is as 
black and gloomy as Dartmoor round about 
Princetown Gaol. And there is no way of 
escape. In this horrible bondage every man 
is a prisoner for life. 

No way out! No, not until God Himself 
made a way, a new and a living way. The 
infinite Love met our deep necessity, and 
across the waste a path appears which 
brightens more and more even into perfect 
day. In the atoning love and grace of Jesus 


LET US HAVE PEACE 19 


Christ the prisoners of despair become the 
children of eternal hope. Through the mys- 
tery of a Cross everybody can recover his 
crown. In a death whose mystery no one 
ean explore we find the springs of a new 
life. And so completely does the divine 
grace meet our necessity that we may not 
only leave the imprisoning desert, we can 
also drop our bonds and our chains. The of- 
fered freedom is not only one of status, it is 
also one of strength and provision. It is 
more than an amnesty, more than a decree 
of emancipation. It is an endowment and a 
bequest. It is the liberty of health. It is 
the freedom of harmony. 


‘Heaven comes down our souls to greet, 
And glory crowns the mercy seat.’’ 


And so this letter begins in clouds and dark- 
ness, but the black skies are rent at the end 
of the fourth chapter, and the blue heavens 
appear and the Kingdom of Heaven is 
opened to all believers. 

And it is just here that we come up to that 
word ‘‘Therefore.’’ ‘‘Therefore, seeing we 
are justified by faith, let us have peace with 


20 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’’ It is 
not an assertion that we have peace. It is 
an appeal to take it. An amnesty is offered ; 
take it! Free pardon is proclaimed; take 
it! But can any one’ be so foolish as to see 
a wonderful deliverance of this kind and not 
accept it? Can we see the great possibility 
and not translate it into glad experience? 
Yes, that is the strange suggestion. Peace 
is offered, a peace which passeth understand- 
ing, but men won’t have it. Men will even 
trudge up to the very Cross with their crush- 
ing burdens upon their backs, and then they 
turn away as though nothing had happened 
there, and they go on carrying their burdens 
with them. It is the one amazing mystery 
of human folly. Here is an appointed place 
where the heavy-laden pilgrim can lay down 
his load and find rest and peace. But no! 
He turns again to the dismal wilderness and 
to his bonds and imprisonment. We should 
surely have expected that when Canaan is 
offered. to men and women they would fly 
from the desert. We should surely have 
assumed that when peace is spread before us 
we should fling ourselves down into it, as 
into a sweet flowering meadow, and we 


LET US HAVE PEACE 21 


should steep our weary souls in the restoring 
and reconciling grace of God. 

What, then, shall we say to these things? 
Well, let us go over the road again which 
leads up to this great appealing word. Let 
us go over it very slowly. Let us stay with 
things long enough to feel them. Let us 
linger at the thirty-second verse of the first 
chapter, and at the fourth verse of the sec- 
ond chapter, and at the twentieth and twen- 
ty-third verses of the third chapter. Let 
us make a stop at every one of these places, 
changing all the plural numbers into the 
singular number, until we have read our- 
selves into a full understanding of the sa- 
ered word. And then more than anywhere 
else let us stay long at the twenty-fifth verse 
of the third chapter: ‘‘ Jesus Christ, Whom 
God has sent forth to be a propitiation for 
our sins.’’ Let everybody find himself in 
that all-enclosing word ‘‘our.’’ Let us kneel 
at the Cross, and let us stay there until vital 
feelings begin to stir in the numb heart, and 
it is as though the winter is over and gone. 

And for a second counsel let this be given; 
let us steadily look away from self to Christ. 
Here is a passage from one of Keble’s let- 


22 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


ters which I think is pregnant with sound 
spiritual advice: ‘‘I hold it to be a selfish 
and dangerous sort of thing for people to be 
always turning their eyes inward. Please 
not to let your own faults or anything un- 
comfortable be often uppermost. It is not 
natural it should be so in those for whom 
Christ died.’’ No, it is not natural. The 
only natural thing is that we should be so 
fascinated and enraptured by the grace of 
Christ that faults and discomforts and fears 
and our sins will all be swallowed up in His 
glory. And therefore let us believingly and 
confidently accept His peace. Let us joy- 
fully forget a heap of our own things! Let 
us joyfully remember the things that are in 
Christ! And in a joyful and enkindling 
hope let us go along our road in blessedness 
and peace. 


IV 
THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS © 


‘‘Tribulation worketh patience; and patience, ex- 
perience ; and experience, hope.’’—Rom. v. 3, 4. 


Wo would have imagined that hope would 
be the child of tribulation? But, then, who 
would have dreamed that the beautiful yel- 
low pond-lily would have been born and 
nourished in its bed of slimy ooze? Who 
would have thought that from coal-tar we 
could extract colours whose brilliance would 
make Solomon’s glory seem dim? Nay, 
who would have thought that from this same 
coal-tar, with its oppressive smell, we should 
derive some of our most delicate and exqui- 
site perfumes? In coal-tar we can find the 
beauties of the dawn and the scent of the 
new-mown hay! And in tribulation we can 
find the strong grace of patience and the 
radiant grace of hope. 

There is no dark experience from which 


we cannot obtain the stuff of noble charac- 
23 


24 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


ter. We can make the apparently un- 
friendly circumstance pay homage to our 
souls. ‘‘The clouds ye so much dread are 
big with blessing.’? Everything is not mis- 
fortune because it comes to us with a frown. 
A gracious gift can come to us in a gay and 
tinted envelope, but it can also come to us 
in an envelope with a black border. And 
therefore it is part of the ministry of be- 
lievers in Christ Jesus to show to the world 
what benediction may hide in dark things. 
We are to be fine experts in growing lilies of 
peace in most unlikely places, and in de- 
riving lovelier tints for the affections in the 
gloomy experiences of disappointment and 
apparent defeat. We are to make manifest 
that ‘‘the things which happened unto us 
turned out rather to be the furtherance of 
the Gospel.”’ 

Now graces, like diamonds resting on dark 
velvet, shine most resplendently against a 
foil of gloomy experience. It is so with 
peace in the midst of tribulation, it is so 
with hope in the time of general fainting, it 
is ‘so with the joy of the Lord in the dark 
and cloudy day. When the noisome thing 
brings forth perfume, the scent is felt to be 


THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS 25 


of a superlative kind. In Christ Jesus we 
are made competent to give this witness be- 
fore the world. It is the promise of His 
word: ‘‘All things work together for good 
to them that love God.’’ Yes, even the dark 
things become the ground-bed of everlasting 
flowers. ‘‘Tribulation worketh patience and 
patience hope.”’ 


Vv 
TALKING AND WALKING 
‘Walk in newness of life.’’—Rom. vi. 4. 


Prruaps I can best express the purpose of 
this meditation by reminding my readers of 
the fable of the young bear who was puz- 
zled to know how to walk. ‘‘Shall I,’’ said 
he to the old she-bear, ‘‘shall I move my 
right paw first or my left, or my two front 
paws together, or the two hind ones, or all 
four at once, or how?’’ ‘‘Leave off think- 
ing and walk,’’ grunted the old bear. There 
are some people who will talk religious dif- 
ficulties day and night. They want to know 
how to pray. They wonder how they are 
to love their neighbour. They are very keen 
to learn how to trust God. And they are full 
of eagerness as to how to help their fellow- 
men. And there are other talkers who are 
concerned about rank and priority in the 
scale of duties. Are they to do this first 


or the other? Should contemplation or 
. 26 


TALKING AND WALKING 27 


action be the first interest, or should the two 
move together? I think talkers of these 
kinds, and perhaps of many other sorts, were 
in the Apostolic Church, for the Apostle 
Paul puts such startling emphasis on the 
necessity of walking. He seems to say to 
his readers, and to say it again and again, 
‘Stop talking and begin walking! How 
are you to do things? Justdo them! Step 
out and get them done.’’ 

Let me recall some of the ways in which 
this counsel is given. Here is one. ‘‘Walk 
in love.’’ It is so easy to talk about love. 
I think it is still easier to sing about it. And 
it makes us feel quite earnest when we in- 
quire about it, and ask what love would do 
along this road or on that road. And the 
Apostle’s answer to much of this talking is 
that we just begin walking. ‘‘Walk in 
love.’’ Set out and do it, and do not spend 
in needless questioning the strength which 
ought to be used in chivalrous service. Just 
begin to love, and like the anxious young 
bear you will find that all your difficulties 
about how to do it are immediately over. 

Here is another piece of Apostolic coun- 
sel: ‘‘Walk in truth.’’ Perhaps some of 


28 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


these early disciples were more inclined to 
be theologians than saints. For theology can 
be divorced from piety. We can be eagerly 
interested in a theory and only very indiffer- 
ently concerned about the life. Theology 
may become a sort of moral opiate, and it 
can put some very precious faculties into a 
deep sleep. The only escape from this peril 
is to make our theology walk. We ought to 
see our great Christian doctrines walking 
about incarnated in the common life of the 
streets. The truth of the atoning love of 
our Saviour ought to walk through our ordi- 
nary affairs in the reconciled lives of ordi- 
nary people. The truth of justification by 
faith should be recognised by its fine stature 
and by its free swinging stride in the forum 
and the market place. The truth of God’s 
forgiveness should not be merely enshrined 
in a fellowship of words. It ought to be 
embodied in forgiving men and women who 
are moving in the ways of the world, and 
who bear the seal of God’s grace on their 
foreheads. We are to walk in truth, and 
in our walk the truth will have its finest 
witness. 

It is by walking that most of our theoret- 


TALKING AND WALKING 29 


ical difficulties are to be solved. Walking 
settles a heap of questions. ‘‘It came to 
pass that, as he was going he received his 
sight.’”’? We walk away from a crowd of 
needless embarrassments which always trou- 
ble the folk who are everlastingly waiting to 
know how to do things and never get them 
done. Itis the life which is the light of men. 


VI 
AN EMANCIPATED SOUL 


‘‘The glorious liberty of the children of God.”’ 
Rom. viii. 21. 


THERE is a precious bell in Philadelphia 
which is guarded with most jealous custody. 
It is the bell of Liberty. It is gloriously 
linked with the birthday of a national life. 
It tolled the glad and momentous tidings 
when a nation achieved its independence 
and breathed the air of freedom. If any 
one will turn to the life and letters of the 
Apostle Paul, and read and listen with dili- 
gent care, he will hear another bell of liberty 
ringing out the glad tidings that a man has 
been born again, and that he has breathed 
the wonderful air of spiritual freedom. I 
don’t think you will travel very far in his 
life, or in his letters, without hearing the 
great bell of liberty sounding forth the 
blessed news of emancipation. Here are a 


few samples of what I call the bell-music 
| 30 


AN EMANCIPATED SOUL 31 


in the Apostle’s witness: ‘‘Our liberty 
which we have in Christ Jesus;’’ ‘‘The lib- 
erty wherewith Christ hath made us free;”’ 
‘Ve have been called unto liberty;’’ ‘‘The 
Lord’s freeman;’’ ‘‘H'ree from the law;’’ 
‘‘Wree from sin;’’ ‘This liberty of yours.”’ 
In this way does the music keep breaking 
out in Paul’s speech and letters, the great 
bell-note which signalises the attainment of 
spiritual freedom and independence, ‘‘the 
glorious liberty of the children of God.”’ 
Now this sense of joy in a new-found 
freedom breathes in all his utterance. Paul 
is like a man who has strangely emerged 
from constraints and limitations of which 
he was scarcely conscious—certainly not 
fully conscious until he has passed beyond 
them. I have a friend who has never been 
rapturously appreciative of natural scenery. 
When others have been revelling on some 
marvellous panorama of colour, or tracing 
some luring horizon-line, he has remained 
strangely quiet and unmoved. But now the 
rapture has come to him, and he thrills to 
nature’s glory. What has happened? By 
an apparent chance, and to his staggering 
surprise, he learned that his eyes were defec- 


32 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


tive, and that he was not seeing the world 
at all as it was seen by his friends. He 
thought he had perfect sight, and he was 
partially blind! The oculist gave him new 
sight, and he discovered a new world. 
‘‘Thou knowest not that thou art blind!’’ 
That had been Paul’s condition as he jour- 
neyed to Damascus. Blind indeed! He 
boasted of his sight! And then Somebody 
came and touched him, and he found new 
eyes, and new sight, and a new world. And 
his consequent joy and freedom of move- 
ment were almost like a dream. But there 
were deeper elements in his liberty even than 
these. He passed from blindness to sight, 
but there was a second transition which 
really explains the first. He passed from 
law to grace, which is like a child going from 
the school-house to his home. Watch a child 
when school is out and home is in sight! 
And Paul was like that. And now I think 
of it, that was his own illustration of the 
transition. ‘‘The law,’’ he says, ‘‘was our 
schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.’’ He 
passed from the sphere of statute, and curb, 
and restraint, and ferule, and prison, Into 
the warm, sunny, genial intimacies of home. 


AN EMANCIPATED SOUL 33 


And oh, the freedom of it! He had been a 
pupil in a hard school, and now he revelled 
in the glory of the liberty of the children 
of God. He had lived in the repressive 
compound of law ; now he roamed in the open 
country of grace. His soul became ‘‘spor- 
tive as the fawn which, wild with glee, across 
the lawn and up the mountain springs.”’ 
But there was another transition, and in 
which order it comes—whether before or 
after, or with the others, it does not really 
matter—but the Apostle passed from sin 
to holiness. Sin had held him as if it were 
a corpse which he was foreed to carry upon 
his back. ‘*‘Who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death?’’ He could not shake 
it off. And then, by the wonderful grace of 
God, the corpse was removed, and it was 
buried in some unfathomable sea known only 
to the heart and wisdom of God. And then 
Paul discovered that he was no longer 
wedded to death, but to life, and to life 
that was sweet, and pure, and radiant as a. 
bride. ‘‘Where sin abounded grace did 
much more abound.’’ And oh, the freedom 
of it! Guilt gone, sin gone, and in their 
place a holy life as lovely as a summer’s 


34 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


morn. Paul’s sense of freedom was the 
secret of his terrific vitality. In all these 
wonderful transitions an energy was re- 
leased, which drove the torpor out of his 
powers, and all his faculties became like 
wide-awake sentinels standing at their posts. 
Everything about Paul pulses with life. He 
challenges grim difficulties with the happy 
air of aman going toa wedding. He under- 
takes vast enterprises which leave other men 
gasping for breath. Paul was tremendous 
in his vitality, and he was vital because he 
was free. 

And because he was so vital he was glori- 
ously vitalising. We can go to him for 
refreshment, and we can always find it. His 
thought is like wine. His word is filled with 
the life which he borrowed from the Lord. 
He is gloriously free and vital, and com- 
munion with him is an inspiration. 


Vil 
HIDDEN BUT NOT SEPARATE 


‘‘Thou didst hide Thy face.’’—Ps. xxx. 7. 
‘* Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ?’’ 
Rom. viii. 35. 


THERE can be a hiding while there is no 
alienation. The face may be hidden, but 
there is no withdrawal of the Presence. 
There may be mist, and cloud, and darkness, 
but the Lord has not gone away. Events 
may be perplexing, but His love abides. 
Our understanding may faint while the 
heart continues her sacred communion. The 
light may tarry, the Life is here! 

There is no one so blind as the one who 
claims to see everything clearly. Who has 
not met the trifler to whom everything is 
plain? He has the key to every lock, the 
answer to every riddle! And this is the 
knowledge that ‘‘puffeth up.’”’ It is a very 
dry and unperceptive thing. It lacks the 


softening moisture of humility and rever- 
35 


36 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


ence and awe. It wants the liquid humour 
without which the eye can have no vision. 

God hides His face! It may be that there 
are some things that would never come to 
any life or stature if it were not for the influ- 
ence of the darkening cloud. There are 
many ferns which would never unroll their 
beauty if it were not for the damp, cooling 
ministry of the shade. Who can grow ferns 
in the dry light of the garish day? And 
there are precious ferns in the realm of the 
soul which would never appear in strength 
and loveliness were it not for the hiding of 
the Face. There is patience, and meekness, 
and humility, and modesty, and there are the 
fine delicate ferns we eall reticence and 
reserve. What is character like if these are 
wanting? And it may be that if there were 
no ‘‘hiding,’’ no shadow, no cloud, these most 
precious virtues and graces might never 
adorn the soul; or, if they did, they would 
be so feeble as to immediately wither away 
‘‘when heat cometh.’’ But when He hideth 
His face the twilight that falls upon us is 
the shadow of the Almighty. 

But let us say it once again, when the face 
is hidden the love is near. Nothing can take 


‘ HIDDEN BUT NOT SEPARATE 37 


that away, not even our sin. And love never 
sleeps. Love never faileth. She never drops 
out of the ranks while stronger troops march 
on. She never faints, and she is always in 
ministry, working out her own gracious pur- 
pose night and day. Is the face hidden in 
our own day? The Love is here: nay, infi- 
nitely better, the Lover is here! 'T'o believe 
it, even while we are in the shadow, is to 
grow in heaven’s gracious mist, to grow in 
grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ. 


Vit 


THE WINNING SPIRIT 


‘‘We are more than conquerors through Him.’’ 
Rom. viii. 37. 


Tis word of the Apostle expresses the vic- 
torious mood in which victory was achieved. 
The early believers in the Lord Jesus won 
the victory in their hearts before they won 
it on the field. In Christ Jesus they antic- 
ipated triumph, and their anticipations 
made the triumph possible. And this mood 
is one of the secrets of victory in every king- 
dom. Is there any record of an army win- 
ning a battle when the soldiers entered the 
conflict believing they would fail? Such a 
gloomy lack of confidence would breed a dis- 
mal progeny of wants, and the army would 
be sapped of its vital resources before the 
battle began. Our biggest inspirations blow 
from the gates of the morning! Let those 
gates be closed, and the soul will be deprived 


of the mystic oxygen which is absolutely 
38 


THE WINNING SPIRIT 39 


essential to her life and strength. There is 
to me a very real significance, and therefore 
something of spiritual direction, in the 
words of the prophet which tell me that the 
glory of the Lord entered the temple by the 
gateway ‘‘which looked towards the east.’ 
He entered by the door which looked to- 
wards the new dawnings, the new revela- 
tions, the door of expectancy and hope! 
‘‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and the 
King of Glory shall come in!’’ Our eager 
confidences become the highway of the Lord. 

And so it is that, in a very real degree, 
we can ascertain the nature of our coming 
victories or defeats by examining the char- 
acter of our expectations. We may regard 
all our unbeliefs as the ministers and pre- 
cursors of disaster. Whenever did unbelief 
go into battle singing a song of praise? 
When did unbelief hammer the strongholds 
of iniquity with blows which shook its walls 
into dust? When did unbelief stride out 
into the second mile with the fine deter- 
mination to make the second mile the justi- 
fication of the first? Itis only the assurance 
of victory which works miracles of this kind, 
and it works them every day. In the spir- 


40 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


itual realm a healthy confidence not only 
sees a highway stretching through coming 
days, and brightening ever more and more 
unto perfect day, but it makes that highway 
the road on which there come the marvellous 
reinforcements of the spirit, which trans- 
form all antagonisms into opportunities of 
glorious achievements. 

And surely this victorious mood is needed 
to-day. Our tasks are tremendous. To lose 
confidence is to lose everything. The devil 
always wins when he breaks our assurance. 
To be sure in Christ Jesus is the beginning 
of victory. Nay, it is victory! ‘‘This is 
the victory which overcometh the world, even 
our faith.’? 


1D.¢ 
POSSESSIVE FAITH 


‘<The love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.’’ 
Rom. viii. 39. 
‘*He loved me.’’—Gau. ii. 20. 


Pavu’s devotional thought alternated be- 
tween the universal and the individual. 
The regular action of his religious life was 
begotten of a sort of pendulum motion, 
moving between what God had done for the 
race and what God had done for him. Or, 
if I may change the figure, his religious life 
had the movement of the skylark; it soared 
to heights of comprehensive vision, ‘‘an 
ethereal minstrel pilgrim of the sky,’’ and 
it songfully surveyed the redemption of the 
world. Then it returned to its nest upon 
the ground, and rested in the assurance that 
its ground was hallowed ground, the home 
of redemptive love and grace. No one could 
ever say that the Apostle Paul forgot the 
world. The world was his parish; it filled 


his dreams. He had found the pearl of 
41 


42 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


great price, he had entered into the un- 
searchable riches of Christ, and he felt hint 
self indebted to everybody on the planet, and 
the indebtedness sent him trudging along 
any road, however long, however dangerous, 
however tedious, that he might persuade 
some one to share his wealth. ‘‘I am be- 
come all things to all men.’’ He certainly 
had the world view. Truly this man was a 
citizen of the world. 

And yet, I say, he came back to his own 
nest. He did not lose himself in vague theo- 
ries in which no soul could find a home. 
The universal localised itself in a human 
habitation. That which embraced the utter- 
most parts of the earth also included him. 
‘‘He loved me, and gave Himself for me;”’ 
‘He called me;’’ ‘‘He revealed His Son in 
me.’’ All these are home-songs. They are 
the glad croonings of the individual heart 
resting upon its own nest. The Apostle has 
been called the expert master of the prepo- 
sition, and, indeed, there is a whole litera- 
ture of grace in the prepositions of his 
epistles. But I am not quite sure that he 
is not just as much a master of the pronoun 
as he is of the preposition. At any rate, if 


POSSESSIVE FAITH 43 


any one will carefully study the great Apos- 
tle’s use of the pronoun he will find himself 
in very rich spiritual mines. And I would 
especially suggest that we study his use of 
the possessive pronoun, where he draws 
some universal treasure into his own life. 
We can watch him, as it were, drawing up 
his blind, and opening his window, and let- 
ting in the splendour of the sunrise in Jesus 
Christ our Lord. And as the glory breaks 
into his chamber he sings aloud of ‘‘my 
light!’’ He looks out of his window upon 
the inheritance of grace, and he speaks of 
‘‘my earnest expectation and hope.’’ He 
surveys the manifold glory of the gospel of 
Christ, and then proudly declares, ‘‘ Whereof 
I was made a minister.’’ He lets his eyes 
roam over continents and worlds of divine 
love, and he rapturously exclaims, ‘‘He 
loved me, and gave Himself for me.”’ 

It is this vital use of the personal pronoun 
which converts a vague creed into a thrilling 
life. For instance, let any one take the 
Apostle’s Creed, and insert a few personal 
possessive pronouns, or transpose its phrases 
so as to suggest individual possession, and 
he will be amazed at the sharpness of the 


4 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


transformation. Universal statements, 
which run over the mind without leaving any 
impression, issue a very startling challenge 
if we make them indicate a personal posses- 
sion. Take this great word from the Apos- 
tles’ Creed, ‘‘I believe in the forgiveness of 
sins.’’? A man may say that, as millions do, 
and the large vagueness of the assertion may 
leave no deeper mark upon his mind and 
heart than if a feather from a bird’s wing 
were to blow across a face of rock. But now 
insert the possessive pronoun, and mark the 
change: ‘‘I believe in the forgiveness of my 
sins.’’ The thing at once becomes alive, and 
full of challenge. We shrink from the shock 
of the word. We are pulled up and made to 
think. We are face to face with reality, and 
we teel the beating pulse in this limb of the 
Creed. And what is the worth of a creed 
unless it can be thus vitalised by a personal 
faith, which converts assertion into reverent 
claim and then converts the claim into pos- 
Session ? 

Or, take this other great word from the 
Creed: ‘‘I believe in the life everlasting.’’ 
That confession may mean something or 
nothing. The universal may have no grip, 


POSSESSIVE FAITH 45 


and I may say the big thing and remain 
unmoved. When men talk in millions they 
are beyond my stride. If they come down 
to the limits of my income their talk becomes 
alive. Well, then, let me bring this great 
credal assertion out of its ineffective range 
and lay it alongside my own affairs. Let 
me individualise it by the use of a singular 
possessive pronoun. ‘‘TI believe that my life 
is everlasting.’’ Again one feels the chal- 
lenge of reality. We may recoil from the 
great word, as indeed we should recoil from 
it unless it has been given to us by our Lord. 
But if He has called us into His communion, 
and we have answered His call, then with 
joyful pride we may proclaim our faith: ‘I 
believe that my life is everlasting.’’ And 
with equal joy and assertion we may say 
to our brother in the faith: ‘‘T believe that 
thy life is everlasting.’’ In Christ the per- 
sonal pronoun unveils our crown. 


x 
THE ARISTOCRACY OF PASSIONATE SOULS 
‘*Fervent in spirit.’’—Rom. xii. 11. 


It is possible to have in life a fervour of ex- 
ceedingly limited range. In the house of my 
being there may be a fire in only one room. 
The warmth may be in single aspects of 
character, in particular powers and demean- 
ours. ‘he fervour may be in work and not 
in worship. It may be in controversy, but 
not in service. Jt may be in a hobby, and 
not in a calling. We may go from one room 
to another and find a startling change of 
temperature. In one room it is like sum- 
mer-time, in another it is likeswinter. The 
business room is at blood-heat, while the 
oratory is at zero. Thomas Arnold, of 
Rugby, used to say that when he could go 
from his knees into his schoolroom and feel 
that the temperature changed in the transi- 
tion he knew that there was something very 


faulty and perverted in his relationship to 
46 


ARISTOCRACY OF PASSIONATE SOULS 47 


God. When the fire of the Holy Spirit is 
here and not there, there is somewhere a 
break in our communion. | 

The Apostle Paul enjoins a fervour which 
pervades and possesses the entire life. It 
is a matter of central heating, which keeps 
the whole house in the strength and comfort 
of a uniform temperature. It is not inten- 
sity of faculty, it is fervency of spirit. It is 
not a partial enthusiasm, it is a devotion 
which fills the life. We are to be spiritually 
passionate, and this is the basal passion 
which radiates warmth into all the faculties 
and powers, and imparts a sacred glow and 
vigour to every aspect of character and 
conduct. And to the great apostle this pas- 
sion is just the fire of holy love, it is the 
ardour of entire consecration, it is the heav- 
enly enthusiasm begotten of intimate com. 
panionship with the Lord. Yes, it is holy 
love, kindling everything with its hallowing 
flame, and transforming even the common- 
est bush into the radiant home of our God. 

It is a familiar word, but one worth re- 
peating, that no virtue is safe until it be- 
comes enthusiastic. It is safe only when it 
becomes the home of fire. Inthe high realms 


48 _ LIFE -IN THE HEIGHTS 


of the spirit it is only the passionate that is 
secure. Noble passion carries immunity. 
Evil contagions find an easy prey in the 
lukewarm, in those whose moral fires are 
dull, and who do not confront the enemy 
with the power of a fierce destruction., The 
Seraphim, those pure spirits.who are in the 
immediate service of the Lord, are the 
‘*burning ones,’’ and, it is their noble privi- 
lege to carry fire from off the altar and touch 
with purifying flame the lips of the unclean. 

‘‘As I mused the fire burned.’’ That is 
how every fire is kindled, whether it be clean 
or unclean. Fires begin to burn in medita- 
tion, in contemplation, in communion. 
When we humbly but persistently seek the 
intimacy of the Spirit it is inevitable that 
we shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit 
‘‘and with fire.’’ We shall be seized in the 
mighty constraints of the eternal Lover, 
and we shall love Him because He first loved 
us. 


XI 
THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT 


“‘Let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us 
put on the armour of light.’’—Rom. xiii. 12. 


HERE is a strange spectacle, the children of 
light wearing the armour of darkness! 
They are fighting the devil with the devil’s 
weapons. Satan is seeking to cast out Satan. 
The soldiers of Jesus are harbouring the 
very spirit they are out to fight! No won- 
der that their warfare has no conquests, and 
that they spend their strength in vain. The 
sharpest sword becomes a painted lath when 
our spirits are defiled. In these realms a 
man’s most fearful foes are they of his own 
household. The indwelling things of dark- 
ness infest and weaken all our powers. — 
A man can no more entertain sin and be 
virile than he can entertain a cancer and be 
healthy. Cancer sends its deadly trail 
throughout the entire currency of the blood; 
and indwelling sin deposits its deadly sedi- 
49 


50 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


ment onevery power of mind and soul. And, 
therefore, the first requisite of an efficient 
army is the mobilisation of moral and 
spiritual resources. The most perilous of 
our weaknesses is an unclean spirit ; the most 
vulnerable of all unpreparedness is that of 
the inner man. 

The Apostle bids us get rid of those deadly 
besetments. ‘‘Cast off the works of dark- 
ness!’? He seems to speak of them as if 
they were a loathsome garment, as some- 
thing that we are wearing which is more a 
hindrance than a help. But can we throw 
them away like a coat? Evil becomes a sec- 
ond nature. What was at first like a loose 
garment becomes at last like a skin. And 
we are not going to divest ourselves of the 
evil thing by an act of even fervent resolu- 
tion. No man can accomplish it in his own 
strength, and it will be vain for him to try. 
The great Apostle teaches that this form of 
disinvestiture is not an act of will, it is a 
work of grace. To strip us of the sin which 
doth so closely cling to us demands the in- 
finite forces of salvation. The Cross is still 
needful to remove my shame and stain. 

But when the soul has been rid of its de- 


THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT $1 


filements, how bright and gleaming is its 
armour! The cleansed soul is shining in all 
the translucent purity of the children of 
God. It is ‘‘light in the Lord.’’ It has 
armour for its own defence, for a character 
which is possessed and illumined by God’s 
holy grace and love is gloriously 1mmune. 
‘‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by 
night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’’ 
And it has armour for all its noble offences, 
for what is so arresting as light, what so 
penetrating, so convincing, so overwhelm- 
ing? ‘‘The light of Israel shall be for a 
fire.’’? ‘‘Let us put on the armour of light.”’ 


4() SL 
UNTO THE LORD 


ibether we live, we live unto the Lord.’’ 
Rom. xiv. 8. 


T am recalling two very strong and gracious 
testimonies which were paid to the life and 
character of the late Bishop Westcott. One 
was by Archdeacon Boutflower: ‘‘In the 
presence of the unseen Westcott met all life, 
and you could not surprise him out of it.’’ 
And the other was by Canon Scott Holland: 
‘‘He read and worked in the very mind in 
which he prayed.’’ Both testimonies are 
concerned with the same experience. Bishop 
Westcott conveyed to his friends the moving 
suggestion of the divine presence, because he 
lived continually in conscious and all-con- 
trolling communion with God. When he 
passed from one thing to another there was 
no change of atmosphere. Nay, there was 
no change of spiritual posture; the mood in 


which he studied was the mood in which he 
52 


UNTO THE LORD 53 


prayed. His religious life was not a bundle 
of. shreds and patches. It was a garment 
woven throughout, and without seam. If 
you came upon him unawares the mystic in- 
fluence was not absent. You could not ‘‘sur- 
prise him out of it.’’ 

Arnold of Rugby said in one of his let- 
ters that he was very much dissatisfied with 
his religious life because he realised such a 
change in spirit and attitude when he passed 
from his private devotions to the common 
affairs and business of the school. And that 
is a dissatisfaction which is shared by a host 
of Christian believers. We leave something 
behind when we leave our chamber. The 
spirit of worship is not regnant in our work. 
We do not pray without ceasing... We do not 
meet all life in the presence of the unseen. 
And, therefore, there are long stretches of 
unconsecrated ground. We worship in this 
mountain, and perhaps in Jerusalem, but 
the distance between the two heights is not 
the highway of the Lord. Here and there in 
life there is a burning bush, but the entire 
forest is not aflame with the glory of the 
Lord. We go to service occasionally ; life is 
not a ceaseless worship. 


54 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


And yet our Father seeks unbroken com- 
munion with His children. He would have 
us meet everything in the fellowship of the 
- unseen Friend. In His light we are to see 
light. Everything is to be viewed in the 
light of His countenance. The unfailing 
sense of His presence makes life a continual 
consecration. We are always at worship, 
and the whole world becomes the temple of 
the Lord. 


XIII 
THE ARRESTING WITNESS OF HOPE 


‘‘The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in 
believing, that ye may abound in hope through the 
power of the Holy Ghost.’’—Rom. xv. 13. 


‘THE God of Hope.’’ Does this mean the 
God Whose nature is distinguished by hope, 
Who broods over the dark regions of chaos 
with quickening confidence? Do the words 
describe an attribute in the Godhead, some 
quenchless optimism through all the changes 
of the countless years? Or do they rather 
describe the source of our hope, the great 
luminary at which we light all our lamps for 
our appointed journeys? Some commen- 
tators emphasise the former and some the 
latter. But why should we separate the two 
interpretations? They are a wedded pair, 
and to divide them is a most unnatural di- 
vorce. They belong to each other as the con- 
vex and concave sides of a circle. Nay, they 
are like spring and stream; they are like 
fountain and issues. Hope dwells in God, 
55 


56 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


and God imparts it. Light dwells in the sun, 
and every flame on the planet borrows its 
fire from the central altar. The God of hope 
kindles hope in the hearts of His children; 
they are lit up with light divine. ‘‘The God 
of hope fill you with all joy and peace, that 
ye may abound in hope.”’ The sun is the 
primary explanation of all our lamps and 
firesides. 

The Seriptures reveal God’s wonderful 
hope for the race, and for every member of 
it. What amazing vistas of possibility 
stretch before us in the Word of God, un- 
veiled by Him Who is the light of life! If 
you would know what hopes our God enter- 
tains for you and me and all men, take time 
to look down those marvellous stretches of 
moral and spiritual distinctions which are 
revealed in His Word. There are corners 
in the Scriptures, points of view we may 
eall them, which are like the head of the 
Gemmi Pass, where you come in sight of the 
Bernese Oberland, or like the summit of the 
Col de Bahm, where Mont Blanc breaks into 
view, and overwhelms you with his glory. 
Stand at those scriptural heights—you can 
find them both in the Gospels and the 


THE ARRESTING WITNESS OF HOPE 87 


HKpistles—and gaze over the far-stretching 
landscape of, grace beyond grace, and glory 
beyond glory—vast reaches of inheritance 
which the Lord of hope has appointed as 
our spiritual possession. And when. you 
have looked long enough to be overwhelmed 
by it, and to be thrown upon your. knees, 
then be very bold with yourself in Christ 
Jesus, and say to yourself, ‘‘Mine, by the 
grace of God! Me, by the grace of God!”’ 
Lift up your eyes unto the hills, the hills of 
moral and spiritual attainment, and let your 
hearts laugh and sing at the vision of your 
splendid inheritance. Let the good Lord 
light up your spirit with a hope kindred to 
His own. Let the Father of lights light 
every lamp in your soul, until your whole 
being is aglow with the radiance of. Chris- 
tian aspiration. 

And is there anything of which the world 
is in greater need just now than men and 
women who are clothed in the shining glory 
of unquenchable hopes? The world is con- 
fused, and disillusioned, and depressed. 
Our ideals have been smitten, and they are 
like quenched and broken lamps. And, 
therefore, of. what unspeakable worth are 


58 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


men and women who have somehow got mys- 
terious supplies of oil, and whose lamps have 
not gone out in the gusty night! I was read- 
ing a letter the other day from the city of 
Vienna, where pessimism hangs over every- 
thing like a dull and heavy pall of smoke. 
‘*Tf a man with hope in his face walks down 
the street people will stop and look at him, 
because he is such an exception to the rule.’’ 
That sentence is a revelation of tragic ne- 
cessity. A man with hope in his face goes 
through Vienna like a man with a lantern 
on a dark road, where other folk are just 
groping their way in depressing gloom. 

But isn’t this just one of the character- 
istics of a true believer in Christ—‘‘a man 
with hope in his face’’? Is not this one of 
his most radiant distinctions? The Secrip- 
tures affirm and reaffirm that this is how 
he is really to be known as he goes along the 
common streets of life. He is to be known 
by the hope in his face. ‘‘Once ye were 
darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.’’ 
They were once like the dull carbon filament 
before it is pervaded by the electric energy, 
but now they are like the same filament when 
the mysterious current has turned its dark- 


THE ARRESTING WITNESS OF HOPE 59 


ness into light. They are spiritually incan- 
descent, burning and shining lights, in the 
power of the Holy Ghost. A man with hope 
in his face! A man lit up! That is a man 
of the Lord’s own making, and every street 
ought to be illumined by His witness. Now 
‘the God of hope’’ fill you with all joy and 
peace in believing, that ye may abound in 
hope through the power of the Holy Ghost. 


XIV 
ORGANS OF HUMANITY 


‘‘The members should have the same care one for 
another.’’—1 Cor. xii. 25. 


Every member of the body is to be the in- 
strument of the body. One man is as the 
eye of the corporate body, and it is his sacred 
function to look and watch in the interests 
of the body. Another man is as an ear, and 
it is his holy office to be alert and listening in 
the interests of the body. Every member is 
to be a social minister. No one’s personality 
is to be used as an instrument of selfishness, 
but as an organ of humanity. 

Now it would seem as if the smaller circle 
is the realm of surest happiness and free- 
dom. The wider the circle the larger will 
be the gathering ground of sorrows and 
eares! Might it not therefore be an act of 
worldly wisdom just to close our eyes and 
shut our ears, or exercise them only in the 


tiny area of our own affairs? ‘‘I want that 
60 


ORGANS OF HUMANITY 61) 


widow well out of my ears, with her ailing 
and wailing!’’ Very well, just turn a deaf 
ear, and you make your escape. And that 
ery from Macedonia! How troublesome is 
this wail from the larger circle! And, if 
we heed it, it will probably lead to increased. 
burdensomeness and fiercer persecution! 
The folk in Troas who do not hear the cry 
have the happier and easier lot! Very well, 
then, just close your ears, and very soon 
you will not hear the pathetic cry, and Mace- 
donia will have ceased to exist. Surely, we 
have this way of escape! We can shut out 
the body and be at rest. 

The reckoning is altogether false. In the 
smaller circle we may possibly find an igno- 
ble ease. But ease is not peace. Ease is 
just the indolence of the beast; peace is the 
holy restfulness of the saint. Kase is the 
stupor born of perverted relations; peace is 
the harmony of right relations. Ease is the 
condition of degeneracy; peace is the condi- 
tion of growth. Whenever my power is used 
as an instrument of ease and selfishness 
there is Inevitable degradation. Everything 
shrinks in the smaller circle, yes, even my 
capacity for the enjoyment which I am so 


62 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


anxious to retain. My receptivity shrinks. 
That is a terrible law. If I shut out my 
brother I am unable to retain myself. Dis- 
miss him and I lose myself, for in dismissing 
him I dismiss the Lord Himself. ‘‘Ye did it 
unto Me!’’ The purposed organ of human- 
ity shrivels into a puny, selfish instrument 
which has no vital communion with the 
Lord. 

The member is appointed for the service 
of the body. The larger circle is our pur- 
posed sphere and home. The ery from Mace- 
donia may lead us into new distresses, but 
it will also lead us into newer wealth in 
human fellowships, and it will give us larger 
access Into the unsearchable riches of Christ. 


AV 
HARD-HEADED 
‘‘In understanding be men.’’—1 Cor. xiv. 20. 


In some things we are to remain as children. 
We are not to grow away from their sim- 
plicity. Here the struggle is not to win new 
fields but to keep hold of land originally 
possessed. In these things retention is our 
noblest conquest. ‘‘In malice be children.’’ 
We are not to grow into the personal knowl- 
edge of the evil thing, and become experts 
in its deadly ministry. We are to seek our 
greatness in our ignorance. Or, if we have 
‘‘advanced’’ into the dark experience, we 
are to renew our royal mastery by a wise 
retreat. In relation to some holy attain- 
ments it is the simple truth to say that 
going backwards is the only progress. ‘‘ Eix- 
cept ye turn again, and become as little 
children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom 
of heaven.’’ 


But in understanding we are to be men. 
63 


64 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


Indeed, one of our surest defences against 
belittling feelings is the cultivation of a 
more spacious mind, a mind which moves 
reverently but freely in the realm of truth 
revealed to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Bitterness is always the product of narrow- 
ness. A man may be proud of his largeness 
of mind, he may boast of the roominess of 
his ereed, but if he be bitter and malicious 
it is a sure sign that his vital thought 1s 
contracted and that he has not found the 
clorious liberty of the children of God. If 
the atmosphere in the berth is pestilential 
it is because the porthole is closed. 

Mr. Roosevelt said on one occasion that 
he did not know which quality is most pro- 
ductive of evil to mankind in the long run, 
hardness of heart or softness of head. That 
is a very suggestive word; but may we not 
add that softness of head produces hardness 
of heart? No man can be so cruel as the 
man of loose and undecisive thought. Soft 
thinking is allied to hard feeling. It is not 
the water which springs from soft limestone 
which is the sweetest and healthiest to drink; 
it is the water that comes from the hidden 


HARD-HEADED 65 


fortresses and strongholds of granite hills. 
If in understanding we are truly men, our 
emotional streams shall be like unto the 
river ‘‘which maketh glad the city of God.’’ 


XVI 
MORE MAN! 
“Quit you like men.’’—I Cor. xvi. 13. 


WE have used four English words to express 
the one original word. No one English word 
can carry the wealth and energy of the 
Apostle’s word. Perhaps we come nearest 
to it in our vigorous phrase, ‘‘Play the 
man!’’ The man in men is to be heroically 
displayed on the difficult fields of the King- 
dom. The manly is to be one of the tokens 
of the Christly. A big manliness is to be 
the sign and witness of a big faith, and is to 
bear its testimony to the dynamic of God’s 
grace. ‘‘Moremen? Moreman! It’s there 
we fail.’’ 

Hor what is our religion worth if it does 
not reinforce our stock of ‘‘man’’? Unless 
our religion gives a man ‘‘more man,’’ what 
part does it play upon the bloody field? A 
strong and yet delicate manliness, delicate 


in its chivalry as well as athletic in its 
66 


MORE MAN! 67 


prowess, is one of the most impressive pres- 
ences which go along the streets of time. 
Everybody is arrested by it. It is not only 
arresting, but commanding. It is not merely 
an object of interest, it is a fountain of 
power. Virtue goes out of it. It shapes the 
erude stuff of circumstances to the pattern 
of its own fine visions. It informs all its 
issues with its own essence. Its speech is 
manly, but so is its silence. Its aggression 
is manly, but so are its restraints. It dyes 
everything in its own colour, and all its effiu- 
ences carry the red blood it a consecrated 
man of God. 

Now this is one of our supreme needs to- 
day—as much in America as in Britain, as 
much in France as among the new friends of 
Christ in China or in India. More man! 
More of that inner mystic dynamic which 
makes everything in one’s life a well- 
equipped soldier of the Lord. And how are 
we to get ‘‘more man’’? Not by shouting, 
either in the roar of the lion or the scream of 
the eagle. No; not by striving, or crying, or 
lifting up our voice in the street. We shall 
get more ‘‘man”’’ from the Son of Man. All 
our springs are in Him. He is ‘‘the very 


68 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


fount of our new day.’’ And the gift will 
eome to us on invisible roads, in holy com- 
merce, through reverent communion, and in 
humble and thoughtful worship at the 
springs. Itisbornfrom above. What other 
way is there? I know of none. What is 
born of the Son of Man is of the Son of Man 
sustained. The Redeemer provides bread 
for His own creation. In His provision we 
become partakers of His nature, and the Son 
of Man reincarnates Himself in the manli- 
ness of the men whom He redeems. 


XVIT 
THE TRANSMISSION OF BLESSINGS 


‘‘The God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all 
our troubles, that we may be able to comfort.’’—2 Cor. 
i. 3, 4. 


HERE is one of the great secrets of great 
living. If we would help others efficiently 
we must recall how God has dealt with us. 
. Forgetfulness in the one direction will breed 
selfishness in the other. Where there is no 
keen sense of divine mercy there is not likely 
to be a broad stream of vital beneficence. 
And even if we were inclined to be beneficent 
our service would probably be wanting in 
fine sense and discernment. It is the remem- 
brance of God’s mercy which inclines us to 
be merciful, and it is the same remembrance 
which endows our mercy with wise and intel- 
ligent sight. What the Lord has done for 
us will teach us what we ought to do to 
others; and how the Lord did it unto us will 
instruct us as to our appropriate moods and 
manners. ‘‘I forgave thee all that debt; 
69 


70 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


oughtest thou not, therefore, to have had 
compassion on thy fellow-servant, as I had 
compassion on thee?’’ Our obligations are 
born in our blessings; if we seriously con- 
sider the one we shall undertake the other. 

And here the Apostle asks us to remember 
our Lord’s comforts. We are to retrace our 
steps down the old road and call to mind just 
how the Lord visited us in the consolations 
of His grace. Weare to recall how He came 
to us in the dark hours of our sorrow and 
pain. We are to recollect how He ap- 
proached us, and in what particular manner 
He gave us His cordials and balms. In 
which of His promises did we find the richest 
bread of endurance? What word was it 
that relit our flickering lamp? Which of 
His inspired hymns gave us new wings of 
faith and hope? What holy vision took us 
far beyond the darkness of our prison-house 
to fairer worlds on high? What was it 
brought back a little salt and savour to our 
tasteless days? So are we to retread our 
yesterdays, with memory and imagination 
all awake, repeopling the road with the mes- 
senger comforts of our Lord. 

And all this we are to do in order that we 


THE TRANSMISSION OF BLESSINGS 71 


may learn how to comfort others. We were 
comforted in order that we might be com- 
forters. We are to take the light He gave 
us and kindle another man’s lamp. We are 
to take His tenderness and touch the sorrows 
of others as He touched ours. Within a few 
hours after Mrs. Gladstone had lost her 
noble husband she was in the home of a 
poor miner, comforting a widow whose hus- 
band had just been killed in the mine. Com- 
forted to comfort! And what need there is 
of comforters to-day! Let us go back on 
our old roads and diligently study God’s 
dealings with us, that in the power of His 
grace we may be skilful in the comfort of 
others. 


XVIII 
EARTHEN VESSELS 


‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels.’’ 
2 ‘Cor. iv. 7. 


THERE is Something wrong when the vessel 
robs the treasure of its glory, when the 
casket attracts more attention than the jewel 
which it bears. There is a very perverse 
emphasis when the picture takes second 
place to the frame, and when the ware which 
is used at the feast becomes a substitute for 
the meal. There is something deadly in 
Christian service when ‘‘the excellency of 
the power”’ is of us and not of God. Such 
excellency is of a very fleeting kind, and it 
will speedily wither as the green herb and 
pass into oblivion. 

Our God delights to put His treasure into 
unobtrusive vessels. He loves to put His 
bounty into modest hands. How often He 
manifests His power in conditions which 
excite surprise in all who see it! We cannot 


72 


EARTHEN VESSELS 78 


explain how such power appears in such 
simplicity. It seems as if such a radiant 
flame should be in a more ornate and attrac- 
tive lamp. Moody’s excellency was in an 
earthen vessel, and many doctors of divinity 
have wondered at the strange association. 
There are thousands of men who are better 
speakers than Moody, and there are thou- 
sands who are better singers than Sankey; 
the vessels are more chaste and striking, 
but the treasure is not there in overwhelming 
glory! 

What mighty power God pours through 
the earthen vessels of plain and simple 
speech! He does not wait for eloquence. 
Indeed, there is a form of eloquence of which 
the Lord seems to be afraid, and He leaves 
it to fly by and ‘‘lose itself on desolate seas.”’ 
And then again, what marvellous power is 
packed into broken prayers! The eloquent 
prayer may attract attention to itself, and 
we may admire the suppliant instead of 
reverently adoring the Lord; but the simple 
prayer, broken it may be by a hundred hesi- 
tancies, reveals the sacred force which takes 
the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. 

And then how God honours simple and un- 


ye LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


showy methods in the ministry of the King- 
dom! The spectacular organisation is just a 
splendid emptiness, while some quiet and un- 
obtrusive fellowship is just laden with the 
excellent glory of the Lord. I think we are 
living in a time when the earthen vessel has 
become a costly exhibit. We like large 
things, showy things, sensational things, 
noisy things, while God still delights in the 
earthen things, and He still chooses ‘‘the 
things which are not, to bring to nought the 
things which are.’’ 

And so we must be prayerfully thoughtful 
at all times lest we appoint vessels to the 
service of the Kingdom which will absorb 
the glory which belongs to God alone. But 
to be thoughtful is not to be careless. Grace 
puts no premium upon shabbiness and dis- 
order. We must not offer to the Lord of that 
which costs us nothing. Our best and hard- 
est pains must be devoted to getting rid of 
all that is theatrical, spectacular, and vain- 
glorious; and we must present to the Lord a 
Jamp which is clean and burnished, but 
which will not distract attention from the 
Presence and glory of the Lord. 


XIX 
SIGHT AND INSIGHT 


‘““The things which are seen are temporal; but the 
things which are not seen are eternal.’’—2 Cor. iv. 18. 


To be able to see the first is sight; to be 
able to see the second is insight. The first 
mode of vision is natural, the second mode 
is spiritual. The primary organ in the first 
discernment is intellect; the primary organ 
in the second discernment is faith. To be 
able to see ‘‘the things which are unseen’’ 
is the commanding difference between the 
mind of the flesh and the mind of the spirit. 
One gazes upon the outsides of things, and 
thereby misinterprets them, for it never sees 
their vital currency; the other pierces 
through the outer veils, and beholds ‘‘the 
things which are unseen,’’ and it discovers 
something of the secrets of the divine order. 
All through the Scriptures this contrast be- 
tween sight and insight 1s being continually 


presented to us, and everywhere we are 
75 


76 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


taught to measure the meagreness and stingi- 
ness of the one, and set it over against the 
fulness and expansiveness of the other. 

Here is Elijah hard beset by material cir- 
cumstances. He is hemmed in by a material 
host, and in all the enveloping circle there 
does not seem to be the narrowest break 
through which he can escape. Materialism 
is rampant and regnant, and it has him fast 
in its grip. Every visible thing reveals a 
prison-gate, and it is closed against his 
release. He is shut in by ‘‘the things which 
are seen,’’ and there is no way out. Who 
has not shared his experience? Our mate- 
rial circumstances have gathered and nar- 
rowed around us until we felt we were in the 
closing embrace of tyrannical iron arms. 
Perhaps the narrowing circle meant a les- 
Sening business, and so it concerned our 
daily bread. Or perhaps it was the invin- 
cible approach of some sickness, and its 
powers seemed to fill the entire field. Or 
perhaps in days of worldly confusion we 
felt that material forces were altogether 
dominant, and we were being crushed in 
their merciless grip. In one of a hundred 
ways we may have been overwhelmed with 


SIGHT AND INSIGHT 77 


the sense that ‘‘the things which are seen’’ — 
were the only things on the field. Well, that 
was the condition of the prophet’s servant: 
the ‘‘seen’’ was to him the “‘all.’’ Every- 
thing was there. He used the powers of 
common observation, and so everything was 
opaque, and nothing was transparent. But 
the prophet had eyes of faith, and sight was 
sublimed into insight. Material veils be- 
came transparent, and an invisible world 
rose into view. ‘‘Lo, the mountains were 
full of horses and chariots of fire!’’ The 
mystic forces were on the march. The little 
circle of material foes was only a fragment 
of the contending hosts. God was at work! 
His troops were on the field. The mountains 
were full of them. And the spirit of the 
prophet beheld these things of the Spirit, 
and he waited for the issues with unshaken 
confidence and equanimity. ‘The servant 
was gifted with sight, the prophet was gifted 
with insight. One had reason, the other had 
faith. 

Here is a certain widow going up to the 
Temple to worship. As she enters she 
quietly drops her offering into the Treas- 
ury. When the Treasurer gathers up her 


78 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


coins he is half-amused at the contribution. 
Two mites, which make a farthing! Not 
much here for the endowment of the Tem- 
ple! Not much here for the emoluments of 
the priests! As ‘‘things which are seen’’ 
the coins were about next door to nothing! 
But there was One, sitting over against the 
Treasury, who was looking on with quite 
another sort of eyes. To Him the visible 
became transparent, and an invisible world 
appeared. ‘‘The things which are not seen’’ 
came into view. Behind the two mites He 
saw a precious motive, He saw a spirit of 
adoration, He saw a passion of love and 
sacrifice. The Treasurer saw two mites, 
Jesus saw a whole heaven, He saw something 
akin to the unsearchable riches of His own 
grace.” 

Here is the Church at Rome. It is re- 
ported to Paul that the Church was ‘‘spoken 
against by everybody.’’ The folk of Rome 
ean see nothing about it which is grand or 
impressive. It has gathered no splendour 
of great names, no weight of distinguished 
authority. Itismean and commonplace, and 
therefore it 1s despised and rejected. As 
one of ‘‘the things which are seen”’ it does 


SIGHT AND INSIGHT 79 


not count. As one of ‘‘the things which are 
seen’’ it is lost in the magnificence of im- 
perial Rome. But the Apostle Paul looks 
upon this Church with other eyes, and in- 
visible things appear. Unseen glories troop 
out and rest upon the commonplace conven- 
ticle. Mysterious distinctions gather about 
the insignificant Church. ‘‘T'o all that are 
in Rome, beloved of God.’’ And now what 
about imperial kinship? Here is splendour 
of lineage and relation! ‘‘Called to be 
saints.’’ These obscurities are here seen to 
be wearing proud titles. They are heirs to 
vast inheritances. Grace and peace are rest- 
ing upon them. In Paul’s eyes these men 
and women are greatly distinguished. He 
beholds their invisible fellowships, and they 
shine in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. 
The passing Roman sees only a grey com- 
monplace, Paul sees the children of God. 
‘‘Now the things which are seen are tem- 
poral; but the things which are not seen are 
eternal.’’ 


XX 
THE INCLUSIVE SACRIFICE 


‘‘They first gave their own selves unto the Lord.’’ 
2 Cor. viii. 5. 


THEY gave their own selves to the Lord, and 
then they gave their money. The one fol- 
lowed the other in natural and vital suc- 
cession. If the first gift is sincere, the sec- 
ond gift is certain. If the first gift is par- 
tial and hesitant, the second gift will be 
maimed and reluctant. The vital gift of self 
is gloriously inclusive of every other offer- 
ing. It is the whole circle which encloses 
the varied segments. It is the integer which 
covers the fractions. It is the great surren- 
der which draws everything else into its 
train. 

When self has been yielded to the Lord 
all other interests and possessions in our 
life will bear the marks of the Lord Jesus. 
Everything and every circumstance will be 


regarded and welcomed as part of the sur- 
| 80 


THE INCLUSIVE SACRIFICE 81 


rendered host. The healthy spiritual life is 
not so much a procession of sacrifices as a 
spirit of inclusive consecration. The queen 
bee has winged her flight in a certain direc- 
tion and the entire swarm is in her train. 
I think this must be the meaning of a sen- 
tence in a letter which was found in the 
pocket of a French sergeant who was found 
dead on the battlefield of the Marne. The 
letter is written to his parents, and this is 
the sentence: ‘‘You know how I had made 
the sacrifice of my life before leaving.’’ 
That was the all-inclusive surrender, and it 
embraced anything and everything that 
might follow. Come what will, my God, and 
come how it will, my life is Thine! Here is 
my life, for all it is and for all it has! Here 
is my life, for all it meets and all it does! 
‘‘T had made the sacrifice of my life before 
leaving!’’ ‘They first gave their own selves 
unto the Lord.’’ | 

Now this is the secret of the Christian 
life, to make the inclusive sacrifice. Reli- 
gious life is inevitably tedious when it con- 
sists of a conscious yielding of our smaller 
things and a withholding of our central 
strength. It is one thing to surrender indi- 


82 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


vidual pounds; it is quite another thing to 
consecrate our wealth. It is one thing to 
build altars here and there on the road; it is 
quite another thing to consecrate the jour- 
ney. It is one thing to be religious in spas- 
modie conflicts, but it is quite another thing 
to hallow the entire campaign. If our self 
is kept back from the Lord, our religion 
will be a procession of reluctances and irri- 
tations. Every circumstance will present a 
separate problem instead of being caught up 
in the sweep of a mighty consecration. And 
that is the trouble with a great many people. 
They try to be religious in smaller surren- 
ders, while the great surrender has never 
been made. And these smaller surrenders 
encounter curbs and restraints, and the 
soul is annoyed and discordant. The large 
surrender brings us into God’s large place. 
We pass into the glorious freedom of God’s 
ehildren, and His statutes become our songs. 


XXI 
THE KINDLING MINISTRY OF ZEAL 
‘“Your zeal hath stirred very many.’’—2 Cor. ix. 2. 


Yes, our hidden fires have deep and far- 
reaching influences. The power of our 
speech may spend itself ina day. Even our 
deeds may be so anemic as to speedily ex- 
haust their effects. But the hidden fire is 
always emitting its rays; it is constantly af- 
fecting the moral atmosphere, and is there- 
fore always related to the lives of others. 
What is that hidden fire? It can be clean 
or unclean. It can be the fire of an impure 
passion, such as jealousy, avarice, or lust. 
It can burn with the fury of destruction, 
and be always consuming the precious rela- 
tionships of common life. Or it can be a 
fire pure and lucent as the sea of glass, and 
its constant glow can make the moral cli- 
mate like an inspiring summer’s day. It 
ean be the fire of hope, stirring everybody 
to sacred cheer. Or it may be the fire of 
83 


$4 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


love making everybody breathe the air of 
heaven. Yes, the fire can be kindled of 
heaven or kindled of hell. 

These Corinthian disciples had the fire of 
zeal. They did nothing coldly. All the is- 
sues of their lives were hot with a passion- 
ate devotion. When they prayed aloud 
others were warmed at their fires. When 
they gave their witness others were kindled 
by their enthusiasm. When they moved in 
ways of common duty their blazing ardour 
encouraged the smouldering energy of 
others. These disciples went about lighting 
the fires of others. 

Where had they got their fire? This is 
the secret: ‘‘He shall baptize you with the 
Holy Ghost and with fire.’ ‘“The God that 
answereth by fire let Him be God.’’ 


ee ee 


XXIT 
THE LORDLY GRACE OF GIVING 
*“God loveth a cheerful giver.’’—2 Cor. ix. 7. 


Gop loveth a cheerful giver because cheer-~ 
ful giving is born of love, and therefore it 
is a Lover loving a lover and rejoicing in the 
communion. Giving is the language of lov- 
ing; indeed, it has no other speech. ‘‘God 
so loved that He gave!’’ Love finds its very 
life in giving itself away. Its only pride in 
possession is the joy of surrender. If love 
has all things it yet possesses nothing. 

But we must not confine our thought to 
material things when we think of the grace 
of giving. We must get back to the fontal 
giving of which the gift of money is only a 
single issue. It is of this primary spring 
that James Hinton has a suggestive word: 
‘We must make our thinking, too, a giving, 
an escape from the death of trying to get.’’ 
That word has surely a very vital signifi- 
eance. Our real giving is to begin in our 

85 


86 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


thinking, and first of all in our supreme 
thinking, which is in our prayers. Self is to 
be lost when we commune with our God, and 
our empty place is to be filled by others. 
We must be cheerful givers in our interces- 
sions, fellow-labourers with God in distrib- 
uting the holy powers of grace over a needy 
multitude. 

When a man begins to be nobly generous 
in his prayers, when his highest thinking is 
a giving and not a getting, he need have no 
care about his minor forms of beneficence. 
It will ‘‘stream from the hills and descend 
to the plains.’”’ When our divine com- 
munion is cheerfully sacrificial the whole of 
life will be an unconscious sacrifice. That is 
a great epitaph on Gordon’s monument in 
St. Paul’s, and it powerfully illustrates this 
law of genial and holy sacrifice: ‘‘He gave 
his strength to the weak, his sympathy to 
the suffering, his substance to the poor, and 
his heart to God.’’ His great surrender was 
the offering of love, and it was made in the 
secret place; and out of that central giving, 
as streams from a fountain, there flowed all 
manner of radiant beneficence. 

I'he people who have no money to give are 


THE LORDLY GRACE OF GIVING 87 


yet not deprived of those joys of cheerful 
beneficence. ‘‘Silver and gold have I none, 
but such as I have give I thee!’’ And he 
imparted a capacity which money could 
never have bought. The Apostle Paul, 
‘“‘havine nothing,’’ longed to visit Rome, 
that ‘‘I may impart unto you some spiritual 
cift.’? In those supreme realms we can all 
be benefactors, ministers of a treasure more 
to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine 
cold. 


XXITL 
COUNTERFEIT VIRTUE 


‘‘Satan himself is transformed into am angel of 
light.’’—2 Cor. xi. 14. 


THAT is our peril. When vice approaches 
us wearing the garb of virtue, when the 
wolf comes in sheep’s clothing, when Satan 
mimics the angels of light. If temptation 
always came to us in its native ugliness, and 
we saw black death in its company, none of 
us would ever follow in its train. If temp- 
tation brought chains to bind us we should 
steadily resist its approach; but it brings 
garlands to crown us, and we become the 
victims of its charms. It comes offering life 
and cheer and good times, and enlargement! 
It bribes us with money and popularity, it 
entices us with visions of prosperity and 
triumph. And we are dazzled by the bright- 
ness, not realising that it is Satan who is 
decked out as an angel of light. , 


And, therefore, have we need of fine eyes 
88 


COUNTERFEIT VIRTUE 89 


in order to see through the skins of things 
to their very hearts. We want the discern- 
ment which can see the death’s-head in the 
proffered crown, and the poison lurking in 
the gleaming wine. Yes, it is imperative 
that we know the Tempter at his first ap- 
proach. We must not offer him opportu- 
nity by our delay, or at any time give him the 
benefit of the doubt. We must know him as 
soon as he appears and begins to display 
his dazzling wares. We must be able to dis- 
criminate among things that differ. ‘‘Lord, 
that I may receive my sight!’’ 

Now, it is just this power of moral dis- 
cernment which is the gift of the Holy 
Spirit. He is the Quickener of our powers, 
and He will so discipline and refine our 
moral sense as to enable us to pierce every 
deceptive guise, and to expose the evil when 
it has borrowed the garments of the good. 
He is the Spirit of enlightenment, and in 
His gracious fellowship we shall not be led 
astray. 


XXIV 
THE UNSPEAKABLE SECRET 


‘‘Unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a 
man to utter.’’—2 Cor. xii. 4. 


Yrs, but it is only as a man has something 
unspeakable within him that he is able to 
speak with irresistible power. The ‘‘un- 
speakable’’ influences everything he says, 
and gives to every word the mystic sugges- 
tion of the infinite and the eternal. The 
man who ean say everything has never very 
much to say. It is the nameless something, 
always struggling for expression, and yet 
never expressed, which carries the awful en- 
ergy of God. It is when we have some ‘‘se- 
eret of the Lord,’’ deeply hiding in the soul 
and refusing all the manifold vehicles of 
speech, that our speech becomes heavily 
weighted with the power of the Holy Ghost. 

Take the unutterable secret of conversion. 
How much ean we say about that hidden 


wonder? How far do the words of the apos- 
90 


THE UNSPEAKABLE SECRET 91 


tle Paul lead us into his own lonely experi- 
ence? He often referred to it, but how lit- 
tle he unveiled! And yet that unspeakable 
secret speaks in everything he ever said. It 
makes the atmosphere of all his speech; it 
determines its tones, and it gives their col- 
our and warmth to all his words. Nothing 
ean carry the secret, but everything bears 
its seal. And so it was when the apostle, in 
one ecstatic experience, was ‘caught up into 
Paradise.’’ All words became like broken 
vessels, yet the light of the glory of that ex- 
perience burns in every letter he wrote in 
after days. 

What language ean tell the secret won- 
ders in the heart of a young girl when love 
is just shyly awaking in the seclusion of her 
soul? Words are almost idle ministries in 
the rising glory, and yet the unspeakable se- 
eret glows and burns in everything. And 
so it is with a saint’s love for the Lord, and 
with a saint’s discoveries of the love of the 
Lord. The things are unspeakable, and yet 
they are always speaking, expressing them- 
selves in graces, and adorning every issue in 
life with strength and loveliness. These se- 
crets cannot be manifested, neither can they 


$2 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


be hid. They are unutterable, and yet there 
is no speech or language where their voice 
is not heard. 

And so we must seek for the unspeakable 
if we would be powerful witnesses for the 
King. We must ‘‘take root downward if we 
would bear fruit upward.’’ We must be 
reverently led into the secret place of the 
Most High, where the secret of the Lord is 
made known to them that fear Him. And 
with these tremendous experiences in our 
souls, things that cannot be spoken, we shall 
yet be manifesting their presence all the day 
long. 


XXV 
THE THORN THAT REMAINED 


‘‘T besought the Lord thrice that it might depart 
from me.’’—2 Cor. xii. 8. 


Was the prayer answered? The Apostle 
was troubled by some physical ailment which 
drained his strength and seemed to interfere 
with the fruitfulness of his work. It was 
like a thorn in the flesh, it continually ob- 
truded itself and mixed its pain with every- 
thing. And he prayed that God would re- 
move the thorn, but the thorn remained. 
Shall we then say that the prayer was un- 
answered? Was the Lord heedless? Might 
the Apostle just as well have saved his 
breath? Quite other is the teaching of the 
Word. The unremoved thorn does not mean 
the unanswered prayer. God most certainly 
answered the prayer, but in quite another 
way than the Apostle dreamed. There was 
not less thorn, but more grace. The burden 


was not reduced, but the sufferer was en- 
93 


94 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


dowed with more power. ‘‘My grace is suffi- 
cient for thee.’’ 

Here is a motor-car somewhat burdened 
and gasping at the difficult hill. There are 
two ways of dealing with it. We can either 
lighten its load by removing part of the 
burden, or we can lighten its load by in- 
creasing its strength. We more than halve 
the hill when we double the engine power. 
And that is the way in which many of our 
prayers are answered. The answer comes 
not in the removal of the difficulty but in 
the increase of our dynamic. ‘‘ Ye shall re- 
ceive power when the Holy Ghost is come 
upon you.’’ Many young Christians are be- 
wildered to find that temptations remain 
even when they have begun to follow the 
Lord. They prayed that the temptation 
might be removed, or that it might no longer 
frown upon them as they went along the 
way. And yet, there it is, towering before 
them as they go to their work, menacing 
them while they are at their work, and ac- 
companying them on their return. If only 
the Lord would remove all our enemies! 
But that is not always His way. Many times 
the foes remain, but the answer is found in 


THE THORN THAT REMAINED 95 


a table prepared ‘‘In the midst of our ene- 
mies.’’ He gives us hidden manna, and the 
surrounding enemy glares at us in impo- 
tence. 

And just because the difficulty and the 
burden remain, what an opportunity this of- 
fers for powerful witnessing. If the Lord 
removed all our thorns, if Christian believ- 
ers had no temptations, no troubles, no diffi- 
eult hills, what a poor, anemic witness we 
should offer to the world! We should pre- 
sent a character that was faced by no enemy. 
We should present a life that was grappling 
with no problem. We should present vic- 
tories without struggle! Is it not some- 
thing infinitely more impressive to see a man 
with a thorn limping along the road with a 
superb spirit? Is there not something cap- 
tivating in the sight of a man or woman | 
burdened with many tribulations and yet 
carrying a heart as sound as a bell? Is 
there not something contagiously valorous 
in the vision of one who is greatly tempted 
but is more than conqueror? Is it not 
heartening to see some pilgrim who is broken 
in body but who retains the splendour of an 
unbroken patience? What a witness all this 


$6 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


offers to the endurement of God’s grace! 
There is the man’s thorn! And we are made 
to wonder how he bears it so well. What is 
his secret? Or here is a woman who has 
heaps of trouble; where does she get her 
mysterious oil which enables her spirit to 
burn and shine so radiantly? And those 
who ask such questions are led to her secret 
and they are brought into the presence of 
the Lord. And so the thorn remains in 
order that we may unveil the Lord. The 
very thorn becomes the revealer of the keep- 
ing grace of our God. ‘‘This sickness was 
not unto death, but for the glory of God, 
that the Son of Man may be glorified.’’ 


XXVI 
THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS 


*‘T have pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in 
necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s 
sake.’’—2 Cor. xii. 10. 


T'HIs is one of the strange paradoxes of the 
Apostle Paul. He takes the most unlikely 
and unfriendly things, and he brings them 
into vital union. You can find them every- 
where throughout his life and teachings. 
Words like these:—‘‘Having nothing, yet 
possessing all things’’; ‘‘We glory in tribu- 
lation’; ‘‘When I am weak, then am I 
strong.’’ I+ is like the marriage of two quite 
opposite personalities. It is like marrying 
summer and winter, or midnight and noon. 
It is the reconciliation of things which are 
seemingly incompatible. And yet it is only 
a fulfilment in human experience of one of 
the beatitudes of our Lord. Did not our 
Lord say to His disciples, ‘‘ Blessed are ye 
when men shall reproach you, and persecute 
97 


98 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


you. ... Rejoice, and be exceeding glad.”’ 
Paul is almost quoting His master in the 
sentence I have taken from his letter to the 
Corinthians; only he is quoting the word as 
a living experience, for in him the word has 
been fulfilled. ‘‘When men shall persecute 
you... rejoice, and be exceeding glad.’’ 
It is the Master’s word; it is the disciples’ 
experience. This sort of joy is like the 
leaping of a spring in a desert waste, it is 
like the sound of wedding-bells in a grave- 
yard. 

The New Testament is full of the strains 
of this extraordinary kind of joy. Let us 
listen to just one of the strains. Here are 
two men, at one time fishermen at the lake 
of Galilee, and they have been witnessing to 
the resurrection of their Lord. And they 
have been arrested. And they have been 
scourged. And with their backs still bleed- 
ing they are going forth into the world 
again. Now then:—‘‘And they departed 
from the presence of the council rejoicing 
that they were counted worthy to suffer 
shame for His name!’’ That is the Lord’s 
beatitude in action. But where does such 
joy come from? Where are its springs? 


THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS 99 


This sort of song, leaping forth in the mid- 
night, where is it born? 

it surely is a very extraordinary kind of 
rejoicing. What-do these men and women 
find in their dark experiences which makes 
them sing like nightingales in gloomy 
woods? Do they make any discoveries in 
the darkness which explains their joy? 
Yes, that is the secret, they have some su- 
premely precious findings which make re- 
proach and persecution seem like nothing. 
What do they discover? They have the won- 
derful joy of discovering God in more and 
more of His glory. The dark places become 
the home of vision. They find their eyes in 
the night, and they penetrate the veil of the 
darkness and see the Lord. Here is one of 
them; he is surrounded by men who hate 
him; they are gnashing upon him with their 
teeth ; the stones are even now in their hands 
with which they will destroy him. How 
now? ‘‘But he, being full of the Holy 
Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, 
and saw the glory of God, and Jesus stand- 
ing on the right hand of God, and said, ‘ Be- 
hold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son 
of Man standing on the right hand of 


100 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


God.’’’ That is a typical discovery of ap- 
ostolic life. The blocked road is wedded to 
the open heavens. When the apostles are 
shut in by the enmities and antagonisms of 
men their spiritual culture becomes more in- 
tensive, and the fruits of the spirit appear 
in their life in amazing strength and glory. 

But there is another discovery which they 
make in their darkness. They have the joy 
of discovering other souls, and winning them 
to the Lord. There are some folk who are 
only found through the medium of dark ex- 
periences. If we never suffered they would 
never be won. The revelation made through 
suffering becomes a constraint which they 
eannot resist. What I mean is this; we see 
some man’s noble bearing under reproach, 
and the splendid testimony lays its grip 
upon us. A brave and radiant endurance 
makes conquests of many men who would be 
unmoved by words spoken in sunny circum- 
stances. It is the encircling gloom which 
makes the testimony glorious. I verily be- 
lieve that Stephen’s magnificent bearing in 
the night laid hold of Saul of Tarsus and 
would not let him go. Saul never got away 
from it, and it coloured his thought and life 


THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS 101 


to the very end. When he himself was 
stoned at Lystra a young fellow was looking 
on, and looking on with awe-inspired admi- 
ration, and the constraint won him to the 
Lord. It was in the night time that Paul 
discovered Timothy, the strong and vital 
comrade in the labours of his latter years. 
No wonder he gloried in tribulation! 

And surely it is in antagonism that we 
discover the joy of battle. To be hit, and 
yet to go at it again! Is there no deep joy 
in that? To be stoned in Lystra, and yet to 
go back again! Coming out of hospital and 
voluntarily going/straight back to the front. 
With that sort of courage there goes a 
strange joy, and it is the joy of the Lord. 


XXVIT 
THE MYSTIC CONTROL OF THE JOURNEY 
‘‘T went up by revelation.’’—GAL. ii. 2. 


Here the ministry of revelation is throwing 
its hght upon an ordinary journey, a jour- 
ney to Jerusalem. Revelation is using its 
rays not to illumine some great doctrine, or 
to disclose a panorama of hidden truth, but 
to ight up a road. This man, Paul, has 
claimed that the great Revealer has opened 
out deep mysteries to his understanding, 
and has given him insight into the mind of 
Christ; but he now makes an even more won- 
derful boast in the Lord; he claims that the 
mystic glory will relate itself to a journey, 
and will determine and direct a visit to Jeru- 
salem. ‘‘I went up by revelation.’’ 

Now we are indeed poor if we assume that 
we have the revealing guidance only in the 
larger explorations of the mind, those vast 
ventures through untraversed continents of 


sacred truth, and that we are left to the dark- 
102 


MYSTIC CONTROL OF THE JOURNEY 108 


ness of our own gropings in the rough-and- 
tumble of everyday life. We are indeed be- 
reft if some truth is Ulumined, but the im- 
mediate road we have to travel is held in the 
deep darkness of tropical woods. Can it be 
that the guiding hand fails us when we need 
light upon the journey ? 

Happily the word of promise is clear and 
sure. There are stars for vaster moments: 
there are lamps for common roads. The 
glory of the Lord is not alone for those who 
travel on great mental pilgrimages in quest 
of lands that are very far off; it is for that 
vaster multitude of pilgrims who travel be- 
tween Antioch and Jerusalem, or between 
the little village and the great town. It is 
a very rich and significant promise that the 
glory of the Lord is to rest ‘‘upon every 
dwelling,’’ and all the commonest interests 
of life are to be lit up in its holy rays. The 
Kternal Light is to ‘‘keep our feet,’’ and 
the ‘‘one step’’ is to be under His gracious 
direction and control. 

A man once declared that he bought a copy 
of Emerson ‘‘by revelation,’’ and it brought 
to him bounty of fine gold? What may have 
been said half-jocularly has very true and 


104 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


profound significance. For such is the 
promise and teaching of the Word. We can 
be led from Cesarea to Joppa by revelation. 
We can choose our calling by revelation. 
That is to say, God’s holy light will pene- 
trate our common judgments in common 
things. Unto the righteous there shall arise 
light in the darkness and they shall know 
the mind of God. 


XX VITI 
THE SCHOOL OF GENTLENESS 


‘‘The fruit of the Spirit is . . . gentleness.”’ 
GaL. v. 22. 


THEY tell us that when Lord Lister was oper- 
ating in the hospital wards at Edinburgh the 
wards became a school of gentleness and 
human sympathy. One of his assistants 
mentions how his countenance darkened 
with severity when an unthinking student 
lifted a broken leg somewhat roughly. 
Everything was done with the tenderest 
solicitude. Even his speech was softened 
with unfailing considerateness. He never 
referred to some hospital patient as ‘‘this 
case,’’ but always spoke of ‘‘this poor man’’ 
or ‘‘this poor woman.’’ Those who laboured 
with the great surgeon are not likely to for- 
get his strength, but they are even less likely 
to forget the gentleness which was the fruit 
ef his strength. 

Well, who can read this of Lord Lister 


105 


106 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


without thinking of the Great Physician, 
and his passage through the hospital wards 
of the common life of men? With what 
infinite gentleness He ministered to bruised 
reeds and broken hearts! What tender 
names He gave them! ‘‘Son!’’. ‘‘Daugh- 
ter!’’ He was never rough, never brusque, 
never impatient, never in a hurry! His 
tender approach was part of the cure. His 
very touch had healing power. He handled 
the burdens of men in such a way as to 
immediately make them lighter. Many a 
broken heart was strangely comforted by 
His Presence even before the life had been 
made whole. Most surely the hospital work 
of our Saviour was a school of gentleness! 
Have we quite learned His way? ‘*Teach 
me Thy way, O Lord!’’ Do we know how 
to lift broken limbs? Do we know how to 
handle broken lives? Do we find more de- 
light in denouncing sins than in helping 
sinners? Are we more expert in abstract 
analysis than in practical comfort? There 
is surely an almost crushing need of gentle- 
ness in days like these. Let us make no mis- 
take about it, we are not less strong when 
we become gentle. Real gentleness is not 


THE SCHOOL OF GENTLENESS 107 


weakened strength; it is strength disci- 
plined, purified, refined. Gentleness is 
matured strength. It is the full corn in the 
ear. Roughness has never finished its 
training. It needs to,go to school. 

And what.is the school? It is the School 
of the Spirit. We need the fellowship of 
the Holy Ghost. And in that academy 
school-time is never over. Every new grace 
unveils another yet to be won. ‘‘Glories 
upon glories hath our God prepared!’’ One 
of the treasures of the school is the grace of 
gentleness. Only we do not so much acquire 
it, we become it. It is not a work, it is a 
fruit. It becomes part of our nature as we 
become partakers of the divine nature, in 
Jesus Christ our Lord. 


X XTX 
CRUCIFIED BY NEGLECT 


‘‘The world is crucified unto me, and I unte the 
world.’’—Ga.. vi. 14. 


THERE is a common interpretation of these 
words which, for lack of a certain propor- 
tion, leads to much serious misunderstand- 
ing. We are presented with the picture 
of a man who has been newly brought into 
life through Jesus Christ our Lord. In 
his new life he sets out with fierce aggres- 
sion to fight the old life. More especially 
he must take a cross and go forth among his 
old interests and pleasures, and one by one 
he must nail them to the cross and crucify 
them. He must never go out without his 
eross. He must never be seen without it. 
At any moment some old enticement may 
meet him on the road, and he must imme- 
diately rear his cross and nail the thing to 
death. He never knows when some carnal 


appetite, some alien delight, may come to 
108 


CRUCIFIED BY NEGLECT 109 


his door, and therefore his cross must be al- 
ways ready, and he must be watching and 
listening, and without the loss of a second 
he must have the tempting thing writhing in 
the throes of crucifixion. 'T'his is the presen- 
tation, and there is, of course, a sense in 
which it is vitally true. Every evil inclina- 
tion must surely be put to death, but it may 
be that God’s wisdom has appointed another 
sort of crucifixion, in which we are almost 
passive spectators, or, indeed, are scarcely 
conscious of the death scenes which are be- 
ing enacted on the frontiers of our life. 
The conception of a crucifixion, in which 
we carry a cross about, ready for any chance 
meeting with old pleasures, is not by any 
means a full portrayal of our new relation 
to the old fellowships in which we once found 
our delight. Let us look at the matter in 
another way. When we become alive in 
Christ Jesus we begin to obtain an entirely 
new class of interests. Jt would probably 
be more accurate to use the singular number, 
and to say that we become absorbed in an 
entirely new Interest. We pass into the 
magnetic constraint of a new gravitation, 
and our life moves toward the central sov- 


110 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


ereignty of a new world. Our interest is 
drawn to the new Interest, even to Him by 
Whom we were redeemed, and Who sits 
upon the throne. ‘‘I, if I be lifted up, will 
draw.’’ We are seized by that mystic spell, 
and our powers are lured to new engage- 
ments. Our attention is caught. Our 
imagination is awakened. Our love is won. 
‘‘Looking unto Jesus’’; that is the attitude 
of the soul, and that is the trend of all our 
spiritual movements. Our minds and hearts 
are set on things above. 

But now, when we have got as far as this, 
a certain law of life is given charge concern- 
ing us, and certain things are done without 
our having to trouble about them. It is a 
law of life that when interest is enticed in 
one direction it is withdrawn from another. 
If a child’s attention and interest are ab- 
sorbed in some dangerous thing, say, a 
knife, the way to destroy the interest is 
by bringing a superior interest on to the 
field. The superior interest leads the little 
soul captive, and the dangerous interest dies. 
That is to say, in the new interest the old in~ 
terests are crucified. They are really stran- 
gled by neglect. They die by being forgot- 


CRUCIFIED BY NEGLECT 111 


ten. They are left, and they are left to.die. 
The new interest crowds the old ones out. 
They are deprived of vital nourishment, and 
they pass away. 

I might further illustrate this law by the 
life of a tree. I have been deeply impressed 
this winter by the tenacity with which old 
oak leaves have clung to the trees. But 
there was no need to worry about them or 
to set up any device for removing them from 
their place. The new sap is rising, and this 
positive internal power is exercising domin- 
ion, and these old associations are being 
pushed off their foothold and are quietly 
dropping into their graves. And it is even 
so with the new life in Christ. It rises like 
heavenly sap in the soul. It courses through 
every faculty and power. It effioresces in 
new interests, new discernments, new apti- 
tudes, new passions, new modes and moods 
of service. And we need not trouble about 
old associations which may still seek to cling 
to our lives. They will be quietly crowded 
out by the new life. Old things pass away; 
behold, all things become new. The new life 
has no use for them, and they pass away. 

And so it is when we become united to 


112 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


Christ. In the Christian life there are some 
things which are no longer wanted. There 
are old pleasures which no longer please. 
There are interests which no longer interest. 
There is no need to crucify them. In Christ 
they are crucified unto us, and we unto them. 
We simply do not want them. They have 
practically ceased to be. We have got a 
clean palate, and the food is no longer palat- 
able, and, therefore, no longer sweet. The 
new taste has killed the old delights. God 
‘‘satisfies our mouth with good things,’’ and 
the things of the old carnival days are for- 
gotten. 


XXX 
THE UNTRAVERSED CONTINENTS 
‘<The riches of His grace.’’—Epu. 1. 7. 


In a published letter, Thoreau, who was not 
always the wisest adviser, for his chords of 
sympathy were not very plentiful or refined, 
gives this admirable counsel, which has, per- 
haps, wider significance than he conceived: 
‘‘Hxplore your own higher latitudes: nay, be 
a Columbus to whole new continents and 
worlds within you, opening new channels, 
not of trade, but of thought.’’ There is al- 
ways very grave necessity that we should be 
reminded of the untraversed stretches of 
country in our own being. There are forests 
which hide wonderful possibilities. There 
are new trails to be cut in the domain of 
thought and imagination which will open out 
vistas of light and beauty. What discern- 
ments are awaiting development! What 
sleeping powers, like the sleeping princesses 
in the old legend, are ready to spring inte 
113 


114 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


vigorous life and service! Yes, there are 
reaches of our own being which are like 
higher latitudes in undiscovered country. 
But I am wondering how the Apostle 
Paul would have given Thoreau’s counsel. 
Paul was very objective, and his counsels 
of exploration would lead us away from our- 
selves. ‘‘Not I, but Christ!’ ‘‘While we 
look at the things which are not seen!’’ 
‘“Beholding the glory of the Lord!’’ ‘‘Look- 
ing unto Jesus!’’ If the Apostle had spoken 
to us of higher latitudes, and bidden us be 
as a Columbus in whole new continents and 
worlds, he would have been directing us to 
the glories of our unclaimed inheritance in 
Christ Jesus. There are hidden wonders in 
the untrodden realm of the divine love. 
There are new trails to be followed through 
the tropical luxuriance of redeeming grace. 
What we have already discovered is only the 
finding of a single leaf as compared with 
boundless forests! It is only the glint of a 
single nugget as compared with the wealth of 
unfathomable mines! And therefore would 
the Apostle have stirred our ambitions to 
covet and explore these waiting treasures, 
for ‘‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 


THE UNTRAVERSED CONTINENTS 115 


neither hath entered into the heart of man 
the things which God hath prepared for 
them that love Him.”’ 

And the wonderful thing is that we can 
use our common circumstances as imple- 
ments and ministers of exploration. We can 
use a dark circumstance to find a bright one. 
They say in Yorkshire, ‘‘Never a nettle 
without its dock!’’ Never a pain without 
there being at hand some compensating 
balm! Let the nettle lead you to look for 
the dock. Let the sting send you after the 
balm. Let some disappointment send you 
exploring for the riches of hope in Christ 
Jesus. Let some seeming failure stir you to 
gain the patience of unanswered prayer. 
Let some bereavement make you a zealous 
discoverer of the consolations of eternal life. 
Let your sin drive you in almost fierce quest 
of redeeming grace. Every circumstance 
may be used as an instrument of discovery, 
and every day we may advance more deeply 
into the higher latitudes of the wonderful 
love of God. 


XX XI 
WHICH IS HIS BODY 
‘<The Church, which is His body.’’—Epn. 1. 22, 23. 


It is a deeply solemn thought, and one quick 
with inspiration and hope, that the Spirit 
of the living Christ seeks reincarnation in 
the fellowship of those who believe in Him. 
In vital reality He would be embodied in 
the corporate life of our own day. His 
Spirit would be the breath and motive of 
all our movements, ‘‘the very pulse of the 
machine.’’ The scriptural metaphor is no 
remote figure of speech, dimly hinting at the 
wonderful possibilities of the children of 
men. It is literally and scrupulously true. 
The Word is even now seeking to become 
fiesh. The divine Spirit is seeking and 
claiming human forms in which to manifest 
His truth and grace. And this mystic em- 
bodiment is to begin with His Church. The 
Church is to be to the living Christ what 


the human form of Jesus was two thousand 
116 


WHICH IS HIS BODY 117 


years ago. The Church is to live Christ, 
to express Christ, to give Christ’s Spirit 
visibility in human life and service. The 
features of its face are to be the lineaments 
of His countenance. Every line is to be 
a sign, and the sign is to be rich and weighty 
in divine significance. The Church is to 
be His body, and in the Church the world is 
to realise the presence of the Lord, and to 
feel the power of His virtue and grace. 

It is an overwhelming claim, and even to 
whisper it seems a grim presumption. But 
nevertheless it is true, and the truth can 
make us free. The embodiment may be only 
partial, and this because the human surren- 
der is mean. The Lord’s consecration may 
be full while ours is only fragmentary and 
broken. There may be little or no room for 
Him in the inn. But however incomplete is 
the embodiment it is nevertheless most real. 
The grace of the Lord Jesus can be seen in 
His Church. His holiness may be seen in 
many a stalwart virtue. His love may be 
seen in countless campaigns of chivalry and 
eagerly accepted sacrifice. Christ’s pity can 
be felt in its compassion. His Spirit, going 
out after that which is lost, can be seen in 


118 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


countless midnight quests, and in prolonged 
search upon the mountains. The Church 
has her failings, she has her reluctanees, she 
has her petty meannesses, she is often way- 
ward and indolent, and she has many sins, 
but whosoever will look frankly into her life 
will find the Presence and the goings of the 
Son of God. He is embodied in countless 
fair and strong lines of character, and every 
virtuous feature is the shining of His face. 
But our risen Lord is in His body, the 
Church, in order that through the Church 
He might become embodied in everything. 
That is the vast and majestic purpose of the 
Incarnation. He embodied Himself in 
humanity in order that humanity might em- 
body Him in every human interest. In the 
completed work of His passion everything 
is to be His body. Every form of human 
intercourse is to be His body; His will is to 
be its pulse, its kindling love is to be its in- 
spiration. Common labour is to be His body 
just as all His own earthly labour was His 
Father’s business. Daily work is to be 
directed by His Spirit, and all its counsels 
and purposes are to be drawn from His 
wisdom. Yes, the lines of labour are to 


WHICH IS HIS BODY 119 


reveal the countenance of the Lord. An 
Act of Parliament is to be His body; it is 
to be Christ’s act as well as ours, and it is 
to do His will on earth even as it is done in 
heaven. Such is the process and progress 
of the Incarnation. ‘It is the filling of 
earth’s water-pots with heavenly wine. It 
is the seizure of all the forms and fashions 
of human activity, and so charging them 
with His Spirit that they vibrate with His 
life and express the riches of His truth and 
erace. - 


XX XIT 


THE MIDDLE WALL 


‘*He is our peace, who hath broken down the middle 
wall of partition between us.’’—EPpu. ii. 14. 


Our Master was always breaking down the 
middle walls of partition. When we turn 
to the Scriptural records, and move along 
the highways of His life, there is a constant 
sound of falling walls. And they are vener- 
able walls which are falling, walls which 
have stood for ages, and which have gathered 
to themselves the sacredness of the sanctu- 
ary. It may be helpful to turn for a moment 
and watch one or two places where the walls 
are falling. Here, then, is one instance. 
The Lord is sitting by Jacob’s well. He is 
in conversation with a woman of Sychar. 
The disciples returned from a visit to a 
neighbouring village and ‘‘they marvelled 
that he talked with the woman, for the Jews 
have no dealings with the Samaritans.’’ 
Jesus went right up to that wall, and touched 
120 


i es 


THE MIDDLE WALL 121 


it, and it fell into dust, and He opened com- 
munion with the presumed alien who had 
dwelt on the other side. 

Here is another instance: ‘‘He is gone to 
be guest with a man that is a sinner.’’ The 
man was a customs officer, in the unenviable 
service of the foreigner, and such men were 
ringed about by walls of most rigid exclu- 
siveness, and religious folk would have no 
fellowship with them. Jesus Christ went 
up to the wall, and He touched it, and it 
vanished like a veil of mist, and He sat at 
meat with publicans and sinners. When 
this middle wall went down the onlookers 
were staggered at the Lord’s transgression. 

The disciples were frequently seeking to 
build new middle walls of partition. But the 
Lord would have none of them and He hurled 
them into dust. Here is one wall being built: 
‘‘Master, we saw one casting out devils in 
Thy name, and we forbade him because he 
followeth not with us.”’ It was a wall of 
— exclusion, and the Master immediately broke 
it down. ‘‘He that is not against us is for 
us.”’ And so all through the wonderful story 
the Lord is breaking the things which break 
the circle of human communion, and He is 


122 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


enlarging human kinships and correspond- 
ences on every side. 

Now these middle walls are very strongly 
built. I saw a church the other day whose 
members are wishing to enlarge it. But 
they are almost afraid of the task. The 
walls are built of stone, dressed from the 
lava of Vesuvius! The circumstance pre- 
sents an almost fierce piece of symbolism. 
In human life there are voleanic eruptions 
of burning passion and hatred, and the is- 
sues of the eruptions are afterwards found 
in lava walls of cold and rigid alienation. 
Racial eruption and racial walls! Keclesias- 
tical eruption and ecclesiastical walls! And 
these lava-built walls seem invincible. 

Some walls are already built, and they are 
so hoary as the great walls of China. For 
instance, there is the caste wall in India. 
There are grim ecclesiastical walls in Brit- 
ain, one middle wall separating Roman 
Catholics from Anglicans, and another mid- 
dle wall separating Anglicans from Non- 
conformists. These walls are of great age, 
and they have become almost a natural part 
of the religious landscape. Other middle 
walls are even now being built. I think I 


THE MIDDLE WALL 128 


see such a wall rising between the American 
people and the Japanese. And I think I see 
such a wall rising between Germany and 
Britain.” 

It is only in Christ Jesus that these lava 
walls find their solvent. When Christ is 
fully and deeply received the walls go down. 
If the middle walls remain in bristling an- 
tagonism it is full proof that the reception of 
Christ has been lukewarm and reluctant, and 
He can do there no mighty works because 
of their unbelief. Christ is the only hope for 
the world. Christ can break down the grim 
middle walls in the world of industry. He 
ean break down the partition walls among 
the classes. He can break down the divid- 
ing walls in the Church. We knock timidly 
at the walls, and when we hear one another’s 
rappings we are filled with joyful hope of a 
new day. But the walls must go down, and 
they will go down when Christ is vitally in 
our midst. 


1 November, 1920.—Eb. 


XXXITT 
THE GREAT COMPANION AND HIS HOUSE 


‘‘That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.’’ 
EPH. iii. 17. 


THE Lord dwelleth not in temples made with 
hands. These are homeless places, even 
though they may have the strength and 
beauty of great cathedrals. We may build 
these wonderful piles, and we may embel- 
lish them with all manner of architectural 
graces, but, if this is all, ‘‘the Son of Man 
hath not where to lay His head.’’ The won- 
derful building may be empty. And yet the 
heart of some poor body, living in one of 
the miserable little houses which so often 
huddle around our Cathedrals, may be a 
favoured spot in which all heaven is inter- 
ested, for it may be all ablaze with the grace 
and glory of the Lord. The material sur- 
roundings matter nothing. Christ was born 
in a manger; He was cradled in Nazareth, 


and His Spirit still visits lowly conditions, 
124 


GREAT COMPANION AND HIS HOUSE 126 


and He seeks a dwelling-place in the hearts 
that dwell within. He makes His home in 
the warm and genial intimacies of the soul. 

But now let us examine this word, 
‘‘dwell,’’ and let us get at its vital signif- 
icance. There is a very great difference 
between visiting a place and living in it. It 
is one thing to have a week-end in the Lake 
district, it is quite another thing to live there 
all the year round. It is one thing to offer 
some one ‘‘a bed for the night’’; it is a very 
different matter to offer him a home for the 
rest of his life. Now Christ wants to dwell 
in our hearts, to settle down there, and live 
day and night, and all the year through, at 
the very centre of our life, near the very 
springs of all its actions and dreams. And 
what do we do with Him? We entertain 
Him for a single meal. We allow Him to 
pay us a visit. We give Him a lodging for 
the night. Yes, perhaps we put up with Him 
for a week-end—a Saturday till Monday 
visit—but on the Monday He must go. We 
don’t arrange for Him to settle down and 
live with us. 

All of which means that we are religious 
by fits and starts. Our piety is a thing of 


126 . LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


bits and fragments. There is no continuity 
in our devotion. There is no settled purpose. 
There is no deep and unbroken communion. 
We have a sort of nodding acquaintance 
with the Lord, in a certain way we are famil- 
iar with His name, but we have no knowl- 
edge of that prolonged and vital fellowship 
which knits days and nights together, and 
which makes the weeks like moments in the 
year. In such broken religion there is no 
constancy of faith, there is no fine consist- 
ency of motive, there is no ceaseless inter- 
flow of noble affection. Things come and 
go. We let Christ in now and again, but we 
do not live with Him. 

But He is wanting to dwell with us: 
‘* Abide in Me, and I in you.’’ He wants to 
come into our hearts, and never go out again. 
And what is this heart which He seeks as 
His home? I do not offer any merely meta- 
physical or theological interpretation of it. 
We know perfectly well what it means to live 
in somebody’s heart, and we know perfectly 
well what it means for somebody to live in 
ours. When we live in any one’s heart it 
means that we are taken into the interior 
room of their life. We have all the priv- 


GREAT COMPANION AND HIS HOUSE 127 


ileges of ‘‘the living-room”’ in their house. 
It is the room where life moves in perfect 
freedom. We put off our ‘‘calling coat,’’ 
and we put on our lounge coat. Everything 
that is stiffly ceremonial is laid aside. Inter- 
course is born and proceeds without any 
formal checks. The imports and exports 
of communion move in perfect freedom of 
trade. And then secret things come out and 
play. Free thought has free expression, and 
love flows abundantly without being con- 
scious that it is flowing at all. This is life 
in the living-room. Itis life in Liberty Hall. 

And it is just there, in that inner room, 
that our Lord wants to dwell. He wants to 
be taken into our intimacies. He wants to 
be one with us in our privacies and simplici- 
ties. He wants to have a vital share in all 
the deep primary impulses which are the 
creative forces of our outer life. All this is 
what the Lord is seeking. But we keep Him 
out of the living-room. We offer Him the 
more formal room of our ceremonies, our 
cold rituals, our stiff conventions, our stated 
worship. We engage Him for our solemn mo- 
ments, but we keep Him out of our mirth. 
We pay Him courtesies, but we don’t play 


128 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


with Him. We have grave words with Him 
now and again, but we do not talk freely with 
Him at the fireside, and in the intercourse 
find that life’s water flows like wine. And 
all the time He wants to dwell with us. 

How do we make our hearts a dwelling- 
place for the Lord? What is our part in the 
creation of the intimacy? What is the first 
thing todo? The first thing to do is to open 
the door, and that is an act of will. And then 
what? ‘‘I will come in.’’ Is that sure? 
As sure as morning follows night! ‘‘ Well, L 
will just put the room a bit in order and then 
Ill lift the latch and let Him in!’’ Nay, 
but that is a deadly mistake. That is seeking 
salvation by works. It is trying to do the 
Saviour’s work, and before we let the Sav- 
iour in. If we can prepare our hearts for 
Him we ean really do without Him. The 
gospel of grace is this—we must open the 
door upon our neglected and disorderly 
room, with all its marks of riot and rebel- 
lion. And the great Guest Himself will take 
control. He will prepare the room for His 
own habitation. And our part is what? 'T'o 
let Him do it! 

There is, I think, a classical usage of the 





GREAT COMPANION AND HIS HOUSE 129 


word which is translated ‘‘dwell,’’ and it 
means to govern, or to administer. This may 
not be in the New Testament content of the 
word, but it is certainly in the New Testa- 
ment gospel. When we let the great Friend 
into our life He begins to administer our 
affairs. The Guest becomes the House- 
keeper, and He arranges things which are 
beyond both our strength and understand- 
ing. And what again is our part? To let 
Him doit! To hand everything over to Him 
in deep, quiet, constant trust. It is ours to 
surrender the living-room to the Lord. And 
when I have done that I shall be able to say 
with the Apostle Paul, ‘‘I live, yet not I, 
Christ liveth in me.”’ 


XXXIV 
INCAPABLE OF FEELING 
‘Past feeling.’’—Epn. iv. 19. 


THAT is a condition of most deadly impover- 
ishment. 'T’o be incapable of noble emotion! 
I do not limit the impoverishment to inea- 
pacity of sorrow, and still less to the inabil- 
ity to shed tears. There is often very deep 
feeling where tears are never seen. There 
is a dry type of emotion, and it is often most 
poignant and profound. Bishop Westcott 
once said that God had denied him the help- 
ful enduement of tears. And yet everybody 
knows that he was gifted with most sensi- 
tive sympathies, and he bore the griefs and 
_carried the sorrows of all the countryside. 
Tears are not always the symbols of fine 
emotion, and their absence does not mean 
that there are no tidal movements of feeling 
in the depths of the heart. Indeed, the feel- 
ing may be all the more fervent because it is 


denied the expression of tears. 
130 


INCAPABLE OF FEELING 131 


But at present I am thinking of the moral 
condition, when the capital of noble feeling 
begins to shrink, and the man is brought 
into a state of emotional bankruptey. For 
instance, there is the fine feeling which reg- 
isters the distinction between right and 
wrong. It is not so much a mental discern- 
ment asamoral sense. It isa kind of spirit- 
ual palate which tests and discriminates the 
moral qualities of moods and actions. In- 
deed, the patriarch Job used this very figure 
of speech when he asked, ‘‘Cannot my palate 
discern perverse things?’’ He knew the 
perversity by its taste. He detected and 
loathed it, as the physical palate detects and 
rejects tainted food. But this fine palate 
can lose its power of discernment. We can 
abuse it. We can drug it. We can stupefy 
it until it becomes numb. Let an expert tea- 
taster defile his mouth with some strong al- 
coholic stimulant and his power of discrimi- 
nation is lost. All teas taste alike, the good, 
the bad, and the indifferent, and he is in- 
competent to appreciate the delicate flavours 
of the excellent. And let a man drench his 
moral palate with strong doses of disobedi- 
ence, and it will speedily lose its refinement, 


132 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


first of all becoming incapable of relishing 
the superlative things, and then mingling 
good and bad together in a common insensi- 
tiveness. The soul becomes past feeling. 

It is even so with every kind of noble 
emotion which is purposed to be a safe di- 
rector amid all the mixed and perplexing 
values of life. Our power of common sym- 
pathy is intended to be an extra sense by 
which we are to perceive the joys and griefs 
of our fellows. We are to taste the waters 
of their life, and according as they are swect 
or bitter we are to weep with them that weep 
and rejoice with them that rejoice. But we 
ean neglect our sympathies. We.can pay 
them no attention. We can refuse to give 
them expression, and expression is the very 
oxygen by which alone they can survive. 
Deny the oxygen and they are smothered. 
They first become drowsy, and then they be- 
come numb. The soul is past feeling. 

And pre-eminently is all this true of the 
noblest sense of the soul, our feeling for 
God. We cannot define this sense. We 
eannot describe it. Itis ‘‘a sense sublime of 
Something far more deepiy interfused.’’ It 
is the feeling of a Presence. In the Chris- 


INCAPABLE OF FEELING 133 


tian life it is the fellowship of the Holy 
Ghost. And this holy sense can be drugged. 
Sin does it. Prayerlessness does it. Care- 
lessness does it. Who is there among Chris- 
tian believers who has not known how some 
unforgiven sin has clouded his sense of God 
the whole day long? 

But it is the glory of our great Saviour 
that He can vitalise benumbed senses. He 
ean restore withered limbs. He can raise 
the dead. He can break the bonds of sealed 
springs. ‘‘For in the wilderness shall 
waters break out, and streams in the desert.’’ 


XXXV 
THE WATCHFUL USE OF OPPORTUNITY 
‘“Redeeming the time.’’—Epu. v. 16. 


THE disciple of Christ is to be an expert 
merchant in the commodity of time. He is 
to be always engaged in ‘‘buying up oppor- 
tunity.’’ He is to allow no one to be the 
peer of the Master’s servant. His vigilance 
must never sleep, and he must never be away 
from the market. Every moment must be 
bought up for the King, and used in the 
service of His Kingdom. 

And therefore the disciple will be busy 
buying in seasons both grave and gay. He 
will not allow the evil one to buy any of the 
brighter seasons for his own infernal pur- 
pose. Seasons of merriment will be pur- 
chased for the Lord; bright moments of wit 
and humour will be gained for Him. This 
will never mean that merriment will lose its 
sparkle; it will really mean that sunlight 


will be added to common daylight, because 
134 


WATCHFUL USE OF OPPORTUNITY 135 


the merriment will shine with the very lus- 
tre and purity of the love of Christ. All wit 
will be perfectly clean and therefore trans- 
lucent, containing nothing which darkens or 
defiles. Gaiety will become the most inti- 
mate friend of sanctity and will be the pos- 
session of the Lord. 

And the watchful merchant will also buy 
up the darker seasons for his Lord. He will 
not allow his moments of disappointment, 
or sickness, or adversity, to be owned and 
used by the devil. He will rather claim that 
the black seasons may be used for the home 
of Christ, and he will accordingly bring them 
and offer them to His service. A dark 
house, with the Lord in it, becomes a temple 
of ineffable fellowship. 

But in all these purchasings everything 
goes to the early buyer. To be first in the 
market must be our constant aim. Let us 
regard every moment as precious treasure, 
and before the enemy of our souls can lay 
his hand upon it let us be up and buy it for 
the Lord. 


XXXVI 
VOCAL THERAPY 


‘*Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be 
filled with the Spirit ; speaking to yourselves in psalms, 
and hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making 
melody in your heart to the Lord.’’—HEPpu. v. 18-19. 


In two of his letters the Apostle Paul rec- 
ommends the ministry of singing to his fel- 
low-Christians. It is not, perhaps, the sort 
of counsel we should expect from this robust 
and intellectual apostle. We scarcely imag- 
ine the gift of song as part of our concep- 
tion of his marvellous equipment. We do 
not think of him singing as he climbs from 
the Cilician plains into the cold, biting air 
of the Taurus mountains. But why not? 
It is probable that we get very much nearer 
to a true image of the man if we think of 
him toiling along his exacting roads in the 
mood of song. The man who broke into 
Singing at midnight in the prison of Phi- 
lippi, when a few hours before he had been 


beaten with Roman thongs, has a very active 
136 


VOCAL THERAPY 137 


sort of minstrelsy in his soul, and it would 
wake into music at the lightest touch of 
events. 

At any rate, he strongly urges the use of 
Singing as one of the inspiring helps in the 
spiritual life. In his letter to the Ephesians 
he recommends it as a substitute for wine! 
‘*Be not drunk with wine, but be filled with 
the Spirit . . . singing and making melody 
in your hearts.’’ He counsels his readers 
not to seek their stimulus through the body, 
but through the spirit, not by the quicken- 
ing of the flesh, but by the exaltation of the 
soul. If they seek spiritual stimulus they 
will have less need of material stimulant; 
the more of song, the less of wine! And who 
has not known the inspiration of song? 
Who has not known the stale flatness of 
some depressing scene lifted away by the 
ministry of song? 


‘‘Sometimes a light surprises 
The Christian while he sings.’’ 


Yes, and when the light breaks upon the 
soul, like some shaft of sunshine breaking 
through on a cloudy day, the bird is apt to 


138 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


sing all the more, with the result that twi- 
light passes into glorious day. 

The Apostle Paul makes a second refer- 
ence to this precious ministry in his letter 
to the Colossians, where he teaches that 
counsel and even admonition can be best con- 
veyed ‘‘in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual 
songs.’’ There is something very attractive 
about this sort of admonition, but one does 
not often meet it. The apostle seems to sug- 
gest that a soul must be touched to sweetest 
harmonies before it is fitted to administer 
reproof. All our own discords must be re- 
moved before we are competent to create 
concord in the soul of another. For what 
can there be that is truly healing and cre- 
ative in any word which is born in a heart 
that is ‘‘like sweet bells jangled, out of tune 
and harsh’’? But if a soul is full of har- 
monies, singing with grace unto the Lord, 
even its admonitions find a ready entrance 
into the lives of others, and are ministers 
of health and healing. 

Those whom we eall experts in the devo- 
tional life are almost in perfect agreement 
as to the helpful ministry of singing in their 
devotions. What riches of singing there are 


VOCAL THERAPY 139 


in the Psalms! ‘‘I will sing, yea, I will sing 
praises unto the Lord;’’ ‘‘I will sing aloud 
of Thy mercies.’’ William Law insists that 
even in private devotions the Psalms should 
always be sung. ‘‘Hor singing is as much 
the proper use of a psalm as devout suppli- 
cation is the proper form of prayer; and a 
psalm only read is very much like a prayer 
that is only looked over.’’ There is nothing 
that so ‘‘awakes all that is good and holy 
within you, calling your spirits to their 
proper duty, setting you in your best posture 
towards heaven, and tuning all the pow- 
ers of your soul to worship and adoration.’’ 
And this testimony of William Law is cor- 
roborated in the experience of multitudes of 
saints. 

Sir Frederick Mott gave an admirable lec- 
ture some time ago to a society which bears 
the attractive name of ‘‘T'he Vocal Therapy 
Society.”’ He told a fascinating story of 
how music is now being used in the ministry 
of healing. At the Maudesley Hospital it 
has passed far beyond the experimental 
stage, and is in confident and constant prac- 
tice. It is being used in nervous disorders, 
and in restoring mental powers to ex-Serv- 


140 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


ice men. The distracted consciousness is 
being led back into unity and peace. Lost 
memory is being recovered. The holy, heal- 
ing Spirit of God is brooding over the 
stricken spirits of men and is restoring their 
broken estate through the seductive and mol- 
lifying ministry of music and song. 

Is this a neglected gift in the aspiring 
life of the soul? It may be that just here 
many a one will find the magic secret which 
gives wings to leaden feet and changes 
weariness into strength. And perhaps it 
would be best to try the secret when we do 
not feel like trying it at all. ‘‘How can we 
sing the songs of Zion in a strange land ?’’ 
Ah, and that is just the place wherein to 
sing them! They give an amazing gift to 
the exiled spirit, and they bring the air and 
fragrance of home to streets and ways on 
foreign shores. 


XXXVII 
TAKING ONE’S STAND 
‘*Stand therefore.’’—EPpu. vi. 14. 


THERE are some people who never seem to 
take a stand. They are always changing 
their ground. You never know where you 
have them! They shift, and they budge, and 
they slip, and they slide. Life is just a dodg- 
ing of difficulties and never a magnificent 
facing of the foe. In these high and critical 
matters the folk who yield an inch will soon 
surrender a mile. They are swayed by loose 
opinions and not by fixed convictions. Or 
perhaps they are moved by sentiments and 
not by ideals. A comfortable feeling is more 
to be desired than a holy war. Indeed, they 
do not know anything important enough to 
warrant the shedding of their blood. To 
them there is nothing more precious than 
quietness. Emblazoned on their dainty, pic- 
nic banner is the legend, ‘‘Anything for a 


quiet life!’’ And ‘‘anything’’ means indefi- 
141 


142 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


nite surrender. While on Jesus’ blood-red 
banner are the burning words, ‘‘ Anything 
for a right life!’’ And ‘‘anything’’ means 
not only the yielding of comfort, but even 
the offering up of life itself! Itis the people 
who never take their stand who tend to emas- 
culate the strength of a nation; and it is the 
same people who are accountable for any 
softness in the militant Church of Christ. 
King Charles’ soldiers said of George Fox, 
‘‘He is as stiff as a tree and as pure as a 
bell!’ It was a magnificent eulogy. George 
Fox could not be bent or twisted by the 
fiercest and most cruel antagonisms. His 
enemies tried it in a score of prisons. They 
could beat and bruise and harm his body, 
but they could not move his soul from its 
loyalty to the Lord. He would not swerve. 
He had taken his stand. He was immoy- 
able. Yes, indeed he was ‘‘as stiff as a 
tree,’’ one of the trees of the Lord, the plant- 
ing of the Lord that He might be glorified. 
Now George Fox’s noble stiffness was the 
companion of a radiant purity. Perhaps it 
would be nearer the truth to say that the 
stiffness was more than the companion of 
the purity; it was its child. He was stiff as 


TAKING ONE’S STAND 143 


a tree just because he was as pure as a bell. 
Purity always breeds strength. Impurity 
always breeds weakness. When disloyalty 
steals into our souls the energy begins to 
leak from our wills. We stand not in the 
truth when there is no truth in us. When 
the truth is in us we are the unbribable foes 
of all iniquity. ‘‘His strength was as the 
strength of ten, because his heart was pure.”’ 

And, therefore, the way to make character 
more steadfast is by making it more pure. 
It becomes stable as it becomes clean. We 
are washed into strength! The blood from 
Immanuel’s veins rids us of both defilement 
and indifference. The grace which makes 
the saint makes the hero too. Yes, when 
we have knelt for cleansing we shal! take 
our stand against the foe. ‘‘He hath washed 
us from our sins and made us kings!”’ 


XXX VITTI 
THE GRACE OF READINESS 


‘‘Have your feet shod with the preparedness of the 
gospel of peace.’’—EPpH. vi. 15. | 


THESE are surely the feet of a herald, shod 
for swift and ready movement. This is a 
cheery courier, bright in his alertness, 
prompt and eager to carry abroad the good 
news of redeeming grace. He is like a man 
whose feet are nimble, whose shoes are ex- 
actly the right size and shape; fitting him 
like a glove, giving him comfort and free- 
dom, enabling him to stride out on any road, 
and to walk all day without fagging. Is 
there anything more harassing, more em- 
barrassing than ill-fitting shoes, or shoes 
that are loosely tied? Is there anything 
more wearying than shoes that pinch and 
cripple you? They add dead weight to all 
your movement. But to have just the right 
shoes, wedded to your feet in perfect union 
—they almost add wings to your feet. And 


this is the simile which is used to describe 
144 


THE GRACE OF READINESS 146 


the feet of the herald of the Lord. There 
is to be a comfort and a nimbleness about 
his feet, a preparedness and readiness of 
movement, an immediateness and a swift- 
ness which will make him spring to the call 
of his Master, and speed upon his errand 
along any road and not stumble. 

Such is the man who is now before us— 
a winged-footed man, ready for any charge. 
The sudden call finds him ready for the road. 
- **Hfow soon can you be ready?’’ said Mr. 
Gladstone to General Gordon, when he pro- 
posed to send him to the Soudan. ‘‘I am 
ready now,’’ answered Gordon. His feet 
were shod with preparedness. In my 
Church in New York I saw sixty or seventy 
Salvation Army officers receive their com- 
missions for home and foreign service. Not 
one of them had any idea where the com- 
mand would send him, whether to a New 
York slum, or to the slopes of the Rockies, 
or to the hinterland of Brazil, or to a 
crowded city in Japan. But they all stood 
in readiness, eager for their going, and as 
they received their commission they wel- 
comed it with a salute, with a joyful ‘‘Hal- 
lelujah,’’ or ‘‘Praise the Lord.’’ Their feet 


146 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


were shod with the preparedness of the gos- 
pel of peace. 

It may be helpful to look at one or two 
of this type of herald as they are revealed 
to us in the Word of God. Here, then, is 
one of them, ‘‘As much as in me is I am 
ready to preach the gospel to you that are 
in Rome also.’’ Great cities had a peculiar 
fascination for the Apostle Paul. He had a 
passion for their strategic centres. He 
coveted and courted them as the meeting- 
places of many roads, and he could send his 
gospel news up these great diverging roads 
to the ends of the world. Whenever a call 
came to him from a great city it stirred him 
like the sound of a trumpet. On the other 
hand, if he heard the trumpet calling to some 
smaller and quieter place he was shod in 
readiness for the journey, and the little place 
became to him the centre of the universe. 
And even when he went to big cities he was 
ready to join little fellowships. He was 
ready to go to Philippi, and when he got to 
Philippi he was ready to join a little com- 
pany of women who met by the river-side to 
pray. Wherever the trumpet sounded his 
feet were ready for the road. Always ready! 


THE GRACE OF READINESS 147 


I do not wonder that at the end of life’s 
long day his feet were still shod with the 
same grace, and that he faced the last bit 
of rough, dark road with this splendid con- 
fidence, ‘‘I am now ready to be offered.’’ 
Here is another Scriptural word which 
reveals the herald of the Lord: ‘‘How beau- 
tiful upon the mountains are the feet of him 
that bringeth good tidings!’’ Surely it is 
the swiftness of the herald that is here so 
beautiful! The wearied folk in the city were 
watching every road on the mountain for 
the coming of the herald. Their eyes were 
strained with watching. But at length the 
herald appeared, and his very speed filled 
them with hope and cheer. No one would 
run as he was running unless he brought 
good news. <A bringer of bad news would 
have fallen lame, or he would loiter; he 
would hang back in his depression, and he 
would defer his sad tale. But the man of 
good news would be breathless in the speed 
of his coming. ‘‘How beautiful upon the 
mountains are the feet of him that bringeth 
good tidings!’’ Such a herald half tells his 
story before he arrives. His speed is part 
of his evangel. Who does not know such 


148 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


people? If we are in trouble they are at 
our door almost before we have made a cry. 
‘‘How soon you got here! However have 
you come?’’? The secret is here—their feet 
were shod with the readiness of the gospel 
of peace. Thrice blessed are they whose 
very speed is part of the message of grace. 

One more glimpse of these ‘‘ Aye, ready!’’ 
folk. Here is one who is described as 
‘‘ready to every good work.’’ That man 
wears fine shoes. They fit splendidly. They 
are good for any road, and, like the shoes 
which the three sisters showed Christian in 
the House Beautiful, ‘‘they never wear out.”’ 
What lovely characters they are, these folk 
who are ready for any bit of work! They 
are not choosers of prominent places; they 
love the quieter posts just as well. If an 
outstanding mission falls to their lot they 
are ready. If it is an obscure bit of work 
they are just as ready. If there’s any gap 
to fill, ‘‘ask Mrs. . . . she’s always ready!”’ 
If there’s a stretch of humdrum road to 
trudge, ‘‘ask Mr. . . . he is always ready!’’ 
Yes, the world owes nearly all its comfort 
and blessedness, under Christ, to those whose 
feet are shod with the preparedness of the 
gospel of peace. 


XX XIX 
BENEFICENT RESISTANCES 


‘“‘The things which happened unto me have turned 
out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel.’’ 
Put. 1. 12. 


Wuart are ‘‘these things’’? They are an- 
tagonisms which have seemingly checked 
and broken the apostle’s ministry. His ene- 
mies have pursued him relentlessly, and he 
is now a captive awaiting trial in Rome. 
The greatest missionary of his day is appar- 
ently silenced. This mighty itinerant for 
his Lord is now a prisoner. His one passion 
is denied expression. Was he inclined to 
murmur? Was he impatient with his re- 
straints? Was he touched with depression ? 
Was there any reaction in his enthusiastic 
spirit? I think that here and there one 
can see signs of a bewilderment which might 
easily have become resentment. I think that 
discouragement sometimes visited the heart 
of the great apostle. He thought his work 
1 


49 


150 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


was being injured, and therefore his spirit 
was bruised. 

But in Rome he remade the discovery 
which he had often made before. He dis- 
covered that behind all the malicious and 
mischievous cunning of men there is an even 
more subtle Worker bringing the malice and 
mischief to nought. ‘*The things which hap- 
pened unto me have turned out!’’ It is a 
very suggestive phrase. He was expecting 
these things to go one way, and lo and behold 
they have turned quite another way. It is 
as though some unseen hand had hold of 
things, and man-chosen purposes were 
turned completely round. He was expect- 
ing only unfriendly issues to his imprison- 
ment, and now issues are appearing which 
are bright and gladdening. He expected 
only bitter things, and here are things of 
surpassing sweetness. Yes, ‘‘out of the eater 
came forth meat, and out of the strong came 
forth sweetness.’’ He could imagine noth- 
ing but that the gospel would be hindered, 
and here it was being furthered by the very 
means which seemed to set it at nought. 

What had the antagonisms accomplished ? 
There was one thing they had done which 


BENEFICENT RESISTANCES 151 


Paul would never have recognised. In- 
deed, if such a suggestion had been made 
to him he would have repelled it, as once 
before he had repelled eulogy and adoration 
at Iconium. They had revealed the strength 
and splendour of his virtues. Paul could 
never see his virtues, but his companions 
did. He knew not that his face shone, but 
they marvelled at the radiance. His virtues 
trooped out in greater glory as the menace 
deepened in its gloom. His loyalty to his 
Lord, his fortitude, his endurance, his in- 
domitable patience, his unbroken faith! All 
these began to shine with a brightness which 
his friends had never seen before. He sur- 
passed himself daily. They thought they 
had known him in other days, but this was a 
new revelation of their friend and leader. 

And what happened? Fire kindled fire. 
Paul’s virtues quickened their confidence. 
His courage destroyed their fears. As they 
gazed upon him their own hearts were 
steeled against persecution and outrage. 
They imbibed his spirit and in their liberty 
they carried about the same virtues which 
he displayed in bondage. ‘‘Many of the 
brethren of the Lord, waxing confident by 


152 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


my bonds, are much more bold to speak the 
word without fear.’’ 

Dear soul! he imagined that their extra 
zeal was born out of pity for him, born of a 
sympathetic remembrance of their im- 
prisoned chief. But it was not his bonds 
nor his sufferings which nerved them; it was 
the virtues he displayed in his bonds. They 
were energised and vitalised by the great 
splendour of this imprisoned eagle. The 
mighty strength of the captive overwhelmed 
them, and their souls were stirred in kindred 
chivalry! Because he was faithful they be- 
came fearless. Because he held out they 
went on. Because he triumphed over his re- 
sistances they marched forth to meet their 
own antagonisms with victorious song. And 
that is what always happens when we face 
our resistances in steady loyalty to Christ. 
The very gloom of our circumstances be- 
comes a foil for our faithfulness. Our wit- 
ness becomes all the more impressive. It is 
like a white seagull crossing a bank of dark 
cloud. Itis like some rare jewel whose radi- 
ance is more deeply displayed by a back- 
ground of dark plush. The blackness shows 
off the stars. Our resistances set our dis- 


BENEFICENT RESISTANCES 153 


cipleship in more impressive relief, and they 
become the unintentioned ministers of the 
divine grace. 

Another thing which our stern resistances 
do for us is this: they greaten and invigorate 
the conscience. Southern airs relax: north- 
ern airs are tonics. Soft and easy circum- 
stances tend to make everything soft and 
flabby. And conscience itself can become 
weak. Its voice may shrink to a faint whis- 
per, like the voice of a man who is dying. 
Its authority may pass away like the author- 
ity of a king who has lost his throne. But 
opposing circumstances act like a bracing 
challenge. A chilling reception may have 
all the effect of a cold bath. Conscience puts 
on strength to meet the menace. Our finer 
loyalties stiffen in the face of fierce attack. 
Paul’s moral sense, his power to grasp and 
define moral issues, were never more Vigor- 
ous than when he was encircled in imprison- 
ing resistance. Nay, his discernments were 
disciplined; in bad, foggy weather he de- 
veloped better eyes. ‘‘The things which hap- 
pened unto him’’ turned out to be the serv- 
ants of moral and spiritual vision. 

One other thing may be said about 


164 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


the unexpected friendliness of unfriendly 
things. Jts resistances make existence ven- 
erable. There is something wonderful about 
a face which has known great sorrow and 
gone through it as some splendid liner weath- 
ers a tempest. Every lineament in the face 
is a line of strength and grace. Life attracts 
to itself some of the reverence which we give 
to an old cathedral. We have only to con- 
trast all this with a life which has known 
no resistance and we shall see a face devoid 
of that profound significance which touches 
the observer with mingled admiration and 
awe. Paul’s very appearance was vener- 
able, and it inspired veneration, and his 
companions moved in his presence as though 
they were treading cathedral floors. 


XL 
THE CONTAGION OF HEALTH 
‘‘Waxing confident by my bonds.’’—Puin. i. 14. 


I wap rather assumed that Paul’s bonds 
would have filled his companions with fear. 
I thought that his imprisonment would have 
been a menace which would have stricken 
their souls with terror. But the prisoner 
eclipsed his prison. His courage was more 
obtrusive than his chains. His fellowship 
with the Lord was more manifest than his 
bondage to a Roman soldier. His light 
shone in the darkness, and the darkness was 
unable to quench it. And ‘‘many of the 
brethren of the Lord,’’ coming into this 
bright, inspiring atmosphere, felt the quick- 
ening of the Apostle’s triumph, and were 
‘‘much more bold to speak the word without 
fear.’? The time of another man’s con- 
straint was the season of their enlargement. 

There is a contagion of health. Our ordi- 


nary thought and speech have made us 
155 


156 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


more familiar with the contagion of disease. 
Weare busy thinking about hostile microbes 
and bacteria, and the havoc which they work 
upon ‘‘the earthly house of this tabernacle.’’ 
And we think of the unfriendly bacteria 
which assail the soul—evil suggestion, ir- 
reverence, unworthy fear, frivolity. But 
there is healthy contagion, soul influencing 
soul with strengthening and inspiring minis- 
tries. Every noble virtue is the base of a 
splendid contagion. Paul’s courage invig- 
orates the apostolic fellowship. 

Think of the contagion of serenity. How 
magnificent is the calming influence of one 
strong man in the initial stages of panic. 
How quieting is the self-possession of one 
strong woman in the day when calamity has 
riven the family circle. Or think of the 
contagion of hope. How all our smoulder- 
ing lamps borrow fresh supplies of oil from 
the vessel of the thoughtful optimist. Or 
think of the contagion of perseverance. One 
man’s quiet, unmurmuring tenacity changes 
the heart of many a deserter and sends him 
back to his post. Yes, graces have their in- 
evitable influences as well as vices. Health 
is as contagious as disease. 


THE CONTAGION OF HEALTH 157 


And the vital contagion can be born in 
obscure ministers. The sacrificial patience 
of Onesiphorus inspired the Apostle Paul. 
And I wonder how much of his inveterate 
youthfulness the Apostle owed to the pres- 
ence of youthful Timothy, his own son in 
the faith. Every soul can be the centre of 
contagious health. Every one in Christ 
Jesus can help to create the spirit and atmos- 
phere of the city of our God. 


XLI 
THE RESOURCES OF A GREAT APOSTLE 


‘‘For I know that this shall turn to my salvation 
through your prayer and the supply of the Spirit of 
Jesus Christ.’’—Pui. i. 19. 


It is good to be permitted to turn into a 
strong man’s life and to examine his re- 
sources. Itis a great privilege to be allowed 
to look into his treasury from which he gets 
his current coin to meet the urgent demand 
of circumstances. And that is our privilege 
with the Apostle Paul. Here is the great 
apostle in captivity in Rome. The greatest 
of all itinerant missionaries is now in bonds. 
He has roamed at large on enterprising ven- 
tures in the cause of the Kingdom of God. 
He has trudged through Asia Minor and 
through lands still more remote. He has 
crossed icy-cold mountains and _ fever- 
haunted plains. He has been a torch-bearer 
for the Kingdom of Light, and genial fires 
have been kindled in every place in which 
he has ministered. And now he is in bonds. 


158 


RESOURCES OF A GREAT APOSTLE 159 


The missionary is a captive. The torch- 
bearer is confined. It looks as if his work is 
over. But no! To this man the imprison- 
ment of the body is not the paralysis of the 
soul. Even a blind alley may be a mystic 
thoroughfare. A chain may be the witness 
of a nobler freedom. A prison may be the 
birthplace of heavenly springs. That is his 
faith, and on what does he rely? ‘‘I know 
that this shall turn to my salvation through 
your prayers and the supply of the spirit 
of Christ.’’ 

And so the Apostle finds a gracious part 
of his resources in the prayers of others. 
And so it comes to pass that apparent weak- 
lings can be the companions of mighty war- 
riors. That is how the man with one talent 
ean be the invisible helpmeet of the man with 
ten. Even a child can bring succour to the 
Apostle Paul. This is the supreme applica- 
tion of the old fable—the mouse ean liberate 
the lion. We can, by prayer, liberate the 
powers of great men and women, and make 
them mighty masters of difficult circum- 
stances. We can, by prayer, impart to them 
a sovereignty by which they are able to 
handle circumstances and turn them to be 


160 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


ministers of salvation, to the glory of the © 
Saviour’s name. I can, by prayer, become 
as a part of another man, and I can go forth 
with him to his battles and his conquests. 
I can travel through Mongolia with James 
Gilmour, and I can help him to be light- 
hearted in the midst of appalling tasks. I 
ean be part of a statesman’s personality 
when he is fighting some great iniquity, or 
championing the children of oppression. I 
can be a great companion of some mighty 
preacher when he stands in the pulpit, and 
I can multiply his resources when he pro- 
claims the Word of Life. Yes, I can, by 
prayer, league myself with another, and I 
can be a mighty helpmeet in giving him 
conquest over circumstances so as to make 
them the ministers of salvation. In this way 
Onesimus can be a part of Paul, Aquila can 
be a part of Apollos, and any child can be 
a part of any great campaigner in the war- 
fare of the Kingdom of God. 

Prayer is the appointed means by which 
rivers of energy are unsealed and directed 
to some crying needs. And therefore vital 
prayer is not a word, it is an act. It is as 
much an act as the waterman’s lifting of a 


RESOURCES OF A GREAT APOSTLE 161 


sluice-gate which lets the higher waters into 
the lock where the waters are low. Prayer 
prepares the ways for the supply of the 
Spirit of Jesus, and in that holy energy we 
have the power which overmatches and con- 
quers difficulties which are otherwise invin- 
cible. 


XLIT 
NOT SCARED! 


“*In nothing terrified by your adversaries.’’ 
Pum. 1. 28. 


THE Apostle takes his metaphor from a very 
sharp and vivid action. It is the figure of 
a startled horse shying at something which 
is only half seen, or which is mistaken for 
something else. And the horse is thrown 
into confusion, and into consequent peril 
of accident or disaster. And the Apostle 
sees a similar peril in the Christian life. As 
we journey along the road we may encounter 
apparently fearful presences which may 
break up our serenity, causing us to shy 
from our appointed goings, and plunge into 
danger of moral disaster. In panic we may 
lose our treasure. But the Apostle does not 
merely suggest the danger; he tells us how 
we can be so prepared, and so strengthened 
and quieted, that we shall go along the most 
menacing road with confidence, ‘‘in nothing 


scared by our adversaries.”’ 
162 


NOT SCARED! 163 


One of the most troublesome things on 
the way of life is the thing that is only par- 
tially seen. We do not see all round it. We 
are like Christian when he was climbing the 
hill Difficulty; we see the lions, but we do 
not see the chains which bind them. We 
can see the menace afar off, but we do not 
see the defensive grace until we get quite 
near. That is a very frequent experience. 
The temptation begins to loom before us, and 
we do not see a way of escape. The almost 
certain loss stares upon us, but we cannot 
see the provision for recovery. Apollyon 
straddles across the way, and we cannot see 
any sign of the promised Friend. The 
enemy seems to have done everything! Our 
Friend seems to have done nothing. And 
we shy! We halt! Perhaps we turn! And 
it is for just such emergencies that the great 
Apostle gives us his counsel. ‘‘Do not be 
seared,’’ he says. Forward! The threat 
is not the entire circumstance, as you will 
discover by continuing your journey! Keep 
quiet! Look straight ahead, and go on! 
When you get a little nearer you shall find 
that the lions are chained. There is cold 
water on this side the wall! There is the 


164 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


oil of inexhaustible grace on the other. ‘‘As 
thy day so shall thy strength be!’’ 

There is another very troublesome thing 
in life. We mistake something for some- 
thing else. The mist is about it, and its out- 
lines are exaggerated, and in form and pro- 
portions it assumes the shape of a menace. 
J was once walking along the Northumber- 
land coast on a very foggy day when there 
loomed. before me the figure of a gigantic 
lion. When I got nearer it turned out to 
be a church! I. have often had such sur- 
prises in the experiences of the soul. The 
menace in the mist has proved to be the 
sanctuary of the Lord. We misinterpreted 
the lions, and we made a threat out of the 
house of grace. A form appears on the deep 
in the uncertain night, and we are afraid, 
and we say, ‘“‘It is a spirit.’’ ‘‘And Jesus 
answered, It is I, be not afraid!’’ 

‘“He that believeth shall not make haste.’’ 
He shall not be urged into feverish haste. 
There shall be no panic. He shall not shy 
‘at the apparent antagonism. He shall be 
endowed with coolness and with calm. 
‘*Said I not unto thee that, if thou wilt be- 
lieve, thou shalt see the glory of God!”’ 


XLII 
THE CAPACITY FOR SYMPATHY 


‘‘Look not every man on his own things, but every 
man also on the things of others.’’—PuHm.. ii. 4. 


PAROCHIAL Vision is never true. If my eyes 
are confined within the circle of my own 
things I shall misread the values of life, and 
I shall become the victim of sore delusion. 
It is in the petty self-circle that evil preju- 
dices are born, and cruel asperities, and 
these always constitute a spiritual fog which 
destroys the accuracy of all our judgments. 
And just here we come upon a very subtle 
irony in the law of life. A man who steadily 
refuses to look sympathetically upon ‘‘the 
things of others’’ can never really see his 
own. He may think that he does, but that 
is only one aspect of his delusion. We can 
only get our true vision by exercising our 
sight in the welfare of our brother. That 
is to say, a vital part of our moral.equipment 


is buried in our neighbour’s field. We refine 
165 


166 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


and purify our lenses in another man’s af- 
fairs. Selfishness never gets beyond frag- 
ments; sympathy makes us whole. A selfish 
man sees nothing truly; he has not found his 
eyes. 

Now the larger life is not gained in a day. 
We cannot leap into a healthful and helpful 
regard for the things of others. True sym- 
pathy is a very delicate and exquisite spir- 
itual ministry. We may so easily bruise 
where we intend to serve. We can be 
brusque in our interest, and awkward and 
clumsy in our attention. Nothing demands 
so tender, and therefore so firm and sure, a 
touch as the fingering of a soul, and if we are 
to do it helpfully we require powers of the 
rarest refinement. For instance, we need a 
well-schooled and disciplined imagination. 
We need to know what is going on behind 
stone walls. We need to be able to pierce 
forced laughter and find behind it a well of 
tears, to get at the back of seeming frivolity 
and find a weary, breaking heart. 

And then, too—we need disciplined emo- 
tions—healthy, tender, responsive. For 
we are to weep with them that weep, and to 
rejoice with them that do rejoice, and no 


THE CAPACITY FOR SYMPATHY 167 


shallow and conventional sentiment will suf- 
fice. We are to be able to thrill to the shy, 
awaking mood of the soul which is just fall- 
ing in love with Christ; and we are to feel 
the gathering chill of a love that is growing 
old and cold in the years. Where can we 
get these needed powers with which to look 
upon the things of others? We ean get 
them in reverent and purposeful prayer to 
Him who has promised to give. 


ALLY, 
ENERGETIC CHARACTER 


‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trem- 
bling, for it is God which worketh in you both to will 
and to do of His good pleasure.’’—Puu. 11. 12-13. 


THERE is certainly nothing passive, nothing 
indolent in the religious life of the Apostle 
Paul. Has stillness is not laziness, neither 
is it the quiescence of a log. It is rather the 
stillness of the central depths of mighty seas. 
There is a profound inner calm at the 
ocean’s heart, but the calmness is associated 
with movement, even tidal movement, and 
the onrushing strength of the breaking wave. 
And energy is one of the most impressive 
and startling characteristics of the Apostle 
Paul. He is like his Master, and virtue is 
always going out of him. And virtue is al- 
ways going out of him because it is always 
being born in him. The stream flows on be- 
cause the spring is never dry. 

Look at the great passage which I have 


quoted from the letter to the Philippians. 
168 


a 


ENERGETIC CHARACTER 169 


Three times is energy named. The entire 
passage pulsates with energy. There is 
energy in expression because there is energy 
in reception. Energy is worked out because 
it is first worked in. ‘*Work out your own 
salvation ... for it is God which worketh 
in you.’’ It suggests to me the analogy of a 
diver working away at the bottom of the 
sea; he gives out energy because the life- 
breath is conveyed to him by friendly allies 
who are working on the surface of the waters 
above him. In a very vital sense the diver 
is being constantly born from above. And 
so it was with the Apostle Paul. His life 
abounded in energy because he drew his 
breath in fear of the Lord. If one may rev- 
erently say it, human endeavour was made 
possible because of the divine travail. He 
was a fellow-labourer with God. 

And so the energy of the great Apostle 
was one of the living witnesses to the faith 
which was in him. The energy was mani- 
fold. There was the energy of love. He 
radiated it everywhere. But the love was a 
really vital energy. It was not like the soft, 
languorous air of Lotus-land which inclines 
to sleep, but it was like the tonic air of the 


170 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


Alps which stirs to athletic effort and moun- 
taineering. Yes, Paul’s love-energy was 
quickening mountain air, and it moved the 
hearts of men to chivalrous tasks. And then, 
again, it was the energy of heroism. It dis- 
played itself in great and splendid ventures, 
and in fearless journeys down new roads of 
thought and service. Paul waxed valiant 
in fight. And there was the energy of joy. 
There are many kinds of joy which lessen 
our stature. We shrink in such delights. 
They relax our fibre and reduce our moral 
height. But the joy of Paul was energy 
which made mountains sink to molehills. He 
rose above his tasks, for ‘‘the joy of the Lord 
was his strength.’’ 

Such are three forms of energy expressed 
in the life of the Apostle Paul. Love and 
joy and heroism abounded in every service 
all along the road. The energy was poured 
out because it was first poured in. Paul was 
in communion with the central dynamic. 
His life was hid with Christ in God. 


XLV 
REPUDIATED ESTATES 


‘‘What things were gain to me, those I counted loss 
for Christ.’’—Pui. ii. 7. 


I REMEMBER reading some years ago an ar- 
ticle by a very able and suggestive writer, in 
which he said that in the Utopia which he 
had imagined the really alive inhabitants 
are busy repudiating their old possessions, 
and handing them over to the State as cum- 
bersome things which they no longer desire 
to carry, as they have found some other 
things which are infinitely better. They are 
surrendering their estates, and getting rid 
of their moneys and all sorts of burdensome 
property, because they have found the love 
of beauty, and a quiet happiness which is not 
dependent on these things, and good health, 
and good temper. I like to recall this Uto- 
pia. I like to picture the folk urgently busy 
getting rid of things which they have de- 
voted every ounce of strength to secure. 
‘‘Away you go! I don’t want you any 
171 


172 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


more!’’ They are repudiating estates which 
for years have been their very life. _ 

But does not this writer’s suggestion ex~ 
pose one of the most common of all delu- 
sions? We are all busy getting estates of 
one kind or another which, in a big and truly 
healthy life, would be regarded as encum- 
brances, obstructing and hiding other things 
of infinitely superior worth. Or, to change 
my figure, do we not get very hot and fever- 
ish, and often very, very tired, gathering 
mere husks, baskets and baskets of them, 
while the real kernels of things are forgotten 
and ignored? We go for the big things 
rather than the great things; that is to say, 
we go for the showy things rather than the 
vital things; we must have things that look 
well rather than things that are essentially 
true. 

For instance, we are far more concerned 
about a good living than a good life. What 
purpose and what energy we put into our 
pursuit of a good living! And how eagerly 
we add one thing to another! Every gain 
becomes the basis of another venture. Our 
granaries are bursting; very well then, we 
will pull them down and build greater. 
There is no end to our acquisitiveness, and 


REPUDIATED ESTATES 173 


it all has to do with things. Sometimes we 
get a glimpse of our folly, but it is only like 
a stray gleam of sunshine in a monotonously 
grey day; it shines for an instant and is soon 
forgotten. We are often heard to say, 
‘‘When I’m fifty-five, or at most sixty, I’m 
going to pull up a bit.’’ That is to say, at 
fifty-five or sixty we are going to begin to 
live! But common experience teaches that 
fifty-five comes along, and sixty is reached, 
but the ‘‘pulling-up’’ does not take place. 
The impetus begotten in the years cannot 
be stayed. ‘T'hey are in the power of a ty- 
rant, and he demands and exacts his tribute. 
‘*Drive on,’’ he says. The victims esteem 
themselves to be free while all the time they 
are slaves. They go on piling up things, 
piling up things! And all the time the best 
things are being overlooked and ignored. 
There are the truly beautiful things which 
death can never blight. There are the truly 
happy moods whose songs go on through 
the night. There are restful dispositions 
There is spiritual serenity. There is spirit- 
ual harmony. And far away, above and be- 
yond all these, there is the wonderful and 
intimate companionship of God! All over- 
looked because we prefer things. ‘‘ All these 


174 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


things will I give thee, if thou wilt surrender 
all the rest!’’ And we close with the offer. 
‘Thou fool!’’? Itis the word of Christ. 

There are others who are far more con- 
cerned about a big reputation than a rich 
and noble character. Again it must be said 
that they covet the big thing, not the great 
thing. They want ‘‘to be seen of men.”’ 
They are ambitious for ‘‘the uppermost seats 
at feasts.’’ They are eager for titles and 
honours. They are hungry for applause. 
And all these things are but the husks of 
life. And when these feverish seekers have 
got them, at the end of the days they have 
nothing but husks. And all the best things 
have been left by the wayside. These poor 
souls have treasured the husks, and thrown 
away the kernels. They are hugging the 
easkets, and throwing the pearls into the 
road. They have repudiated ‘‘the Pearl of 
great price.’’ 

Why not have a repudiation service, and 
put all secondary things in their place? 
Why not have a repudiation service in which 
first things shall be made supreme? We 
ean enter that Utopia now, and its name is 
the Kingdom of God. 


XLVI 
DRAWING A CROSS 


‘<That I may know Him and the fellowship of His 
sufferings.’’—Puit. iii. 10. 


In the later days of the war, when America 
had only just come into the conflict, there 
were grave difficulties of transport. Only 
a limited number of American troops could 
cross the Atlantic. There was a certain com- 
pany from which a draft was to be taken. 
Every man in the company was keen to go, 
but only a few could be taken. Who should 
the few be? They decided to cast lots. A 
number of papers were put into a hat, just 
as many as there were men, and crosses were 
put on some of the papers, and every man 
who drew a cross was to go to France. One 
boy wrote to his father, and this line was 
in the letter, ‘‘If ever I prayed in my life 
I prayed to-day that I might draw a cross.”’ 
The spirit of this American boy, and the 


symbolism in which the passion was en- 
175 


176 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


shrined, seems to me to express the spiritual 
ambition of the Apostle Paul. He was al- 
ways eager to draw a cross. He had a pas- 
sion to fill up that which was behind of the 
afflictions of Christ. Even when he prayed 
for the enlargement and enrichment of his 
spiritual resources his prayer was always 
linked with the further ambition of sharing 
the sufferings of the Lord. Watch him on 
this great roadway of spiritual aspiration, 
‘‘That I may know Him, and the power of 
His resurrection!’’ But he does not end 
there. To stop there would be to seek to fill 
his own treasury without any desire to flow 
over into the deep, craving necessities of 
others. It would be greediness for gain, and 
the shutting out of pain. His gain would be 
not only unearned increment, for our spir- 
itual gain is always that, but uninvested in- 
ecrement. And so the Apostle relates his in- 
tense desire to know Christ with the further 
eagerness to enter into practical fellowship 
with His Cross. ‘‘That I may know Him, 
and the power of His resurrection, and the 
fellowship of His sufferings.’’ It is there he 
draws across. He wants to use his spiritual 
resources to explore the deeper secrets of re- 


a 


DRAWING A CROSS 177 


demption, and this in an experimental life 
which shares the passion of the cross. 

It is even so with Simon Peter. His let- 
ters glow with eagerness to share the glory 
of divine communion. But he wishes not 
only to know the secrets of the light, but the 
mysteries of the night. He would ever draw 
a cross. In his letters the word ‘‘partaker’’ 
occurs at least three times, and the varieties 
of its usage are very significant. ‘‘Partak- 
ers of the glory!’’ The first and last would 
be maimed without the second. The second 
is a kind of roadway between the first and 
third. Through the sufferings to vital glory! 
Let any one read the first letter of Peter, 
and he will see and feel the Apostle’s burn- 
ing eagerness to draw a cross. He did not 
wish to reach his end by any short cut 
through By-path Meadow. He wanted the 
way of the cross. 

Many of us are more intensely concerned 
to draw the lucky-bags of life than to draw 
its crosses. We would dearly like to sit with 
Christ on His right hand or His left hand 
in His kingdom, but we shrink from the cup 
that He drank of, and the baptism where- 
with He was baptised. And yet the real 


178 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


joy is in drawing the cross and following the 
Saviour. In one of the riots in China, Grif- 
fith John received a blow on his head. He 
put his hand up to the wound, then looked 
at it, and there was blood. He says that 
when he saw the blood, the first blood he ever 
shed for Jesus Christ, he was filled with an 
extraordinary exultation in the spirit. He 
knew the joy of the Lord. In the cross he 
found his crown. 


XLVITI 


THE DISTANT SCENE AND THE NEXT STEP 


‘‘T follow after . .. 1 press toward the mark, for 
the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’’ 
Puiu, iii. 14. 


I ruink I know perfectly well what John 
Henry Newman meant in the familiar lines 


**T do not ask to see 
The distant scene; one step enough for me.’’ 


The sun has gone down, darkness has fallen 
over the world. The roads lose themselves 
in the gloom. No moon is in the sky, no 
stars. I have just a lamp in my hand, and 
it throws its friendly light about my feet, 
and I can see the next step, and then the 
next, but I can see nothing beyond. That is 
Newman’s symbolism, and in this symbolism 
his vital concerns are expressed. His world 
is filled with confusion. Reason has no clear 
landscape. There are no long, open roads 
of definite comprehension. He does not see 
how things are going to emerge. He cannot 
179 


180 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


discern a way out. Clouds and darkness are 
round about him. But he silences his 
clamorous spirit. He draws it back from 
its struggles with the night. He realises the 
strain of trying to peer into things which 
are concealed. ‘‘I do not ask to see the dis- 
tant scene!’’ And yet he would not sit down 
and become inactive. He would not be pas- 
sive until the darkness lifted, when he might 
continue his journey through the landscape 
filled with light. Even though there is gloom 
in front of him he would keep on moving, 
ever moving! ‘*Keep Thou my feet.’’ Even 
though the darkness enfold me let me con- 
tinue walking! One step at a time! ‘‘One 
step enough for me.’’ 

That is something of Newman’s meaning, 
and the movement of his spirit is clear. And 
yet I have always some reluctance, some 
slight check of hesitancy, when I sing the 
line, ‘‘I do not ask to see the distant scene!”’ 
‘I do not ask!’? And yet I am afraid I 
often do. At any rate I ask that the goal 
may shine through the gloom and that the 
slow journey may be cheered by the thought 
of destination. But, then, probably New- 
man would do all this, and his soul would 


DISTANT SCENE AND NEXT STEP | 181 


keep the end in view even when the dark- 
ness was thick upon the intermediate road. 
Because the distant scene has so much to do 
with the next step. If there be some light 
ahead, even though it be only a gleam from a 
cottage window, it gives direction and in- 
spiration to one’s steps. 

I. remember I was once appointed. to 
preach at Saddleworth. it was a ‘‘supply’’ 
on our college list. I stayed. with an old 
farmer. After the afternoon service I put 
up at his house until the time of the evening 
train. And the darkness fell; and the quiet 
day turned to a very stormy night, and soon 
the rutty roads were living streams. When 
the time for my train was getting near my 
friend gave mea farm lantern, ‘‘just to help 
you to see where you are going, and to keep 
you out 0’ the ditch!’’ Well, that was some- 
thing, but he added something that made it 
better. ‘‘Do you see that glimmer of light 
yonder?’’ .‘*No,.where?’’ And then he 
trained my eyes to catch a far-off gleam that 
looked miles away. ‘‘That is Saddieworth 
Station; make for that!’’. The two things 
gave me what I needed. The old, worn lamp 
gave me light for my feet, and each step 


182 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


became clear, and that glimmer of the dis- 
tant scene gave me cheer and appointed the 
course of my journey. 

And this surely is something like what the 
Apostle Paul had upon the way of his 
troubled and stormy life. There was always 
something shining through the gloom and 
confusion, even ‘‘the mark of the prize of 
the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’’ 
His imagination was always lit up with the 
splendour of the goal. His eyes were never 
empty of light. The goal was never sepa- 
rated from his steps. It inspired every step 
he took. You can see it in the story of his 
life, and in his own account of his spiritual 
moods and movements. ‘‘That lght yon- 
der!’’ He never missed it, and he never 
lost it. ‘‘I follow on if that I may appre- 
hend that for which also I was apprehended 
by Christ Jesus.’’ His eyes were bright with 
the light of destiny. That which was distant 
brought a glory to that which was near. 

And so the Apostle followed on to the next 
step because of the continued inspiration he 
found in the goal. He drew reserves from 
the distance and they gave spring and buoy- 
ancy to his feet. Indeed, it may be said that 


DISTANT SCENE AND NEXT STEP 183 


he took the very next step in a sort of associ- 
ation with the final step. The ultimate was 
wedded to the immediate. He practised 
walking in the golden streets even while 
his feet were still on the flinty roads. That 
is the wonderful thing about God’s shining 
goals. They come out to meet you. They 
are like the mysterious island in ‘‘ Peter 
Pan’’—we go out to seek the island, and we 
discover that the island is out seeking us. 

There are many people who take the next 
step badly just because they have no distant 
scene. Nay, there are many folk who have 
no next step because they have no home. It 
is all right about your next step when you 
have home to go to, and you are on your 
way home. But to have no home, to be a 
vagrant, to have ‘‘nowhere to go’’—well, 
there is no next step which marks the line 
of an increasing purpose, the highway of a 
growling progress and attainment. 

And one further word about the ministry 
of the distant scene. It is the feeling for the 
distant that so often reveals what the next 
step is to be. We discipline and refine our 
sense of the immediate by our fellowship 
with that which is far away. Our eyes ac- 


184 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


quire a keenness and we discover an in- 
creased power of discernment. And so there 
is something profitable in star gazing! It 
strengthens the eyes for the nearer tasks. It 
is more than likely that we shall increase our 
common sense by enlarging our spiritual 
sense, and that our immediate duties will 
become clear in the light of the ultimate 
vision. ‘‘In Thy light shall we see light.’’ 
‘“‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a 
guide unto my path.”’ 


XLVIII 
THE TEST OF TENDENCY 
**T press toward the mark.’’—Pui. ili. 14. 


THAT is the primary matter—where are we 
tending? For, after all, we are always tend- 
ing somewhere. Life is never stationary. 
We are always in motion. The choice is not 
offered to us as to whether we will move or 
not move. We are bound to move; we are 
all the children of tendency, and the direc- 
tion is left to the decision of the personal 
will. 

Now the main tendency of a life is re- 
vealed in its apparently smaller concerns, as 
well as in the greater. A straw shows the 
direction of the current. Our dominant 
trend can be inferred from our trifles. Our 
leading ambition is manifest in everything. 
Everything is carried in the primary en- 
thusiasm, as the loose things on a railway 
track are caught in the rush and sweep of a 


passing train. In a truly consecrated life 
185 


186 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


even ‘‘the bells upon the horses are holiness 
unto the Lord.’’ The Apostle Paul swept 
his tent-making into the common passion of 
his devotion to the Lord. His very saluta- 
tions became part of his worship, and dull 
conventionalities burned with the altar-fires 
of God. He had his mark, and that mark 
settled the trend of everything. 

It is imperative, therefore, if we would 
be in the Apostle’s fellowship, to determine 
our trend, and we determine our trend when 
we have chosen our mark. In our life we 
either drift or steer. ‘’o what shall we steer? 
What shall be our haven? What shall be our 
goal? What is the choice of the great 
Apostle? ‘‘I press toward the mark, for 
the prize of the upward calling of God in 
Christ Jesus!’’ The Apostle chose what the 
good Lord had chosen for him. It was his 
holy ambition to apprehend that for which 
he had been apprehended by Christ Jesus: 
The Lord had called him to holiness, to a 
perfected salvation, to the liberty of the 
glory of the children of God! 

And the Apostle’s ‘‘mark’’ was an upward 
calling. Once he surrenders himself to the 
mark everything in his life will feel the 


THE TEST OF TENDENCY 187 


power of the heavenly gravitation. Our 
mark is always our magnet. If it is the 
Lord who is ‘‘lifted up,’’ He will draw every- 
thing in our life unto Him. Ordinary con- 
versation will have the savour of divine com- 
munion. Common work will have something 
of the life and elevation of worship. Even 
in our many bewilderments we shall be mov- 
ing surely toward the light. Let us choose 
our mark, ‘‘The high calling of Jesus,’’ and 
our life, in all its strangely mingled experi- 
ences, will have one trend, one goal, one final 
glory. 


XLIX 
THE PATRIOTISM OF THE SOUL 
‘*Our citizenship is in Heaven.’’—Puu.. iii. 20. 


Anp that is our true country. And our re-. 
lationship to it constitutes our highest pa- 
triotism. All other forms of patriotism must 
bow to this, and from this they must borrow 
their spirit and their aims. When the 
earthly citizenship is out of harmony with 
the heavenly citizenship it becomes a min- 
ister of moral discord and disaster. Indeed, 
patriotism which is harshly divorced from 
the heavenly citizenship is only a deadly 
form of selfishness, and it is creative of un- 
limited bitterness and strife. But the local 
patriotism which is pervaded by the large 
inspiration of the heavens is as beautiful as 
some local rose bush which has breathed in 
the wider air of Devonshire or in the golden 
climate of California. In these matters 
everything depends upon relationship. Our 


patriotism can be of the earth earthy; or it 
188 


THE PATRIOTISM OF THE SOUL 189 


can be nourished by the atmosphere of 
Heaven. | 

The patriotism of the soul finds its spirit 
in Heaven. Its temperament and temper 
are pure and warm and genial. It is like 
unto ‘‘a sea of glass mingled with fire.’’ 
There is nothing dark about it, nothing harsh 
and exclusive. Its sense of the individual 
welfare is governed by the larger interests of 
the family. Its service of man is done in the 
spirit of humanity. Its citizenship is of the 
world, and it seeks the blessedness of the 
world for which Christ died. ‘‘God so loved 
the world that He gave His only begotten 
Son.’’ Our patriotism is a minister of divine 
health when it is infused with the sacrificial 
spirit of the Lord. 

The patriotism of the soul finds its ideals 
in Heaven. Our Master approached every- 
thing from the loftiest standpoint. ‘‘I am 
from above.’’ And therefore He brought the 
things from above to the things that are 
below. He brought the heavenly type to the 
earthly commonplace. And that is the coun- 
sel which is given to His followers in His 
Word. ‘‘See that thou make all things ac- 
cording to the pattern shown to thee in the 


190 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


Mount.’’ The ideal of the upper world is to 
determine the movement of the lower world. 
That is an essential part of all healthy pa- 
triotism. Our eyes are to be filled with the 
light of the heavenly vision when we set our- 
selves to an earthly task. When we are be- 
ginning to reconstruct society, or to build a 
wall that is in ruins, we are to have before 
our minds ‘‘the holy city, the new Jerusalem 
coming down out of Heaven from God.’’ 
That is the governing standard of the heavy- 
enly citizenship. So long as that vision fills 
our minds and hearts, we cannot possibly 
build into our structures anything that is 
hay or wood or stubble, and still less any- 
thing that is rotten or unclean. 

And the patriotism of the soul finds its 
noblest franchises in Heaven. No book more 
fervently exults in freedom than the New 
Testament. It proclaims the essential free- 
dom without which all other professed free- 
doms are only clever forms of bondage. We 
may sing about freedom when the only thing 
which has happened has been that the 
shackles have been taken from our limbs. 
But a man may lose the outer chains and yet 
remain in most debasing bonds. It is pos- 


THE PATRIOTISM OF THE SOUL 191 


sible that a man who is singing songs of 
liberty may be feasting upon the husks of 
freedom. But when we have the heavenly 
franchise the soul rejoices in the real thing, 
in the glory of the liberty of the children of 
God. When we are free with the freedom of 
the heavenly citizenship our soul has found 
her wings. She has been made free in Truth. 
Nay, she has been freed by Him who is the 
Truth. She has the liberty of the divine 
Sonship and rejoices in the sacred mreherarani 
of the F'ather’s house. 


iv 
THE KNIGHTS OF THE RED CROSS 


‘‘Other my fellow labourers whose names are in the 
book of life.’’—Puit. iv. 3. 


THESE are noble knights who have left no 
written biography. Even their names are 
not blazoned in any visible scroll. They just 
went away on a chivalrous errand, and shed 
their blood in a royal service, and nobly 
lived, and bravely died. They belong to the 
brilliant élite of the rank and file, whose 
heroism has no earthly herald, but whose 
courage and sacrifice win great fame in the 
courts of heaven and throughout the city of 
our God. All they seek is a place of service, 
and they are unconcerned about its being a 
place of honour; they aspire after travail 
rather than applause; the greatest task pre- 
sents the most coveted office ; and the emblem 
of their life is not a trumpeter but a quiet 
eross. Indeed, in the very best and deepest 
sense of the word, they belong to the dis- 
192 


THE KNIGHTS OF THE RED‘ CROSS 198 


tinguished company of the Red Cross 
Society. | 

The world has always been deeply in debt 

_ to these Knights of the Red. Cross. Their 
blood is the seed of the Church. Nay, it is 
through their hallowed sacrifices that the 
race renews its youth. We may not know 
the ministers of our restoration any more 
than the man who was healed wist that his 
Healer was Jesus. But the blood of their 
sacrifice gets into our veins like hallowed 
fire, and in our limbs there is born the pos- 
sibility of heroic deeds. Sacrificial blood is 
never like spilt milk, a futile waste and be- 
yond recovery. Sacrificial blood is never 
shed like the intermittent rains which fall 
on desert sands. The blood is the life, and 
when it is given away in lavish surrender 
to a noble cause it is directed by the holy 
Lord Himself into the anemic veins of the 
race. In this profound sense death has im- 
mediate resurrection. 

Life which culminates in sacrifice has 
reached its appointed goal. We are given 
our life in order that we may learn how to 
lay it down. School is over when that lesson 
is perfected. A young fellow who lays down 


194 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


his life for others at the age of twenty-one 
has died in maturity and is ready for pro- 
motion. Selfish people are infants even 
though they are three-score years and ten: 
martyrs are full-grown even though they are 
only in their teens. School is over! ‘‘Come 
up higher!’’ 


LI 
THE WITNESS OF DIFFICULT ENTERPRISE 


*‘T can do all things through Christ which strength- 
eneth me.’’—PHIL. iv. 13. 


THE Christian believer is to give witness of 
his communion with Christ by his ability to 
do difficult things. The power of the resur- 
rection must be attested in chivalrous enter- 
prise. There must be a certain quiet and 
sunny assurance in doing impossible things. 
It must be given naturally, spontaneously, 
unconsciously, and with all the quietness 
with which a strongly engined motor-car 
takes a precipitous hill. To a sixty-horse- 
power motor a stiff gradient does not exist. 
To a soul which is strengthened with the 
grace which is in Christ Jesus impossibili- 
ties are wiped out. ‘‘I can do all things in 
Christ.”’ 

John Smith, of Harrow, the man whose 
sacrificial piety has left such a firm seal upon 
hundreds of Harrovians, was once speaking 
of some display of moral courage to an old 


pupil, who remarked: ‘‘That was very diffi- 
195 


196 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


eult. I wonder he could doit.’’ ‘‘ Difficult ?”’ 
answered John Smith—‘‘ Difficult? He was 
a Christian!’’ That is the apostolic tone, 
as that is the apostolic spirit. The apostles 
faced the changing road in the faith that 
they had sufficient equipment for every en- 
counter, and that every frowning difficulty 
would be only a privileged opportunity for 
additional conquest. Difficulty became an 
occasion for the unlocking of larger re- 
sources in the unsearchable riches of Christ. 
And so every difficulty came to be inter- 
rupted as a promise, and the promise was 
always redeemed. Where difficulty abounded 
grace did much more abound. 

The world is always arrested by the quiet 
and splendid achievement of difficult things. 
To see sorrow borne with hopeful courage, 
to see prosperity worn with thoughtful ten- 
derness, to see disappointment met with 
sweetness, to see the long, uncertain day en- 
dured with patience, to see personal injuries 
received in unrevenging meekness, to see 
kindness in the garish day, and to hear songs 
in the night—all these make the world stand 
still and wonder. Thus do our very difficul- 
ties become the missionaries of redeeming 
grace. 


‘LI 
A GARDEN IN THE GLOOM 
‘*T have all things and abound.’’—Pum.. iv. 18. 


In one of my garden books there is a chapter 
with a very arresting heading, ‘*‘ Flowers that 
grow in the gloom.’’ It deals with those 
patches in a garden which never catch the 
sunlight, the dull corners which at no part 
of the day are found with shining faces. 
And my guide tells me the sort of flowers 
which are not afraid of these dingy corners, 
nay, rather like them and flourish in them. 
There are plants which seem to thrive in 
apparent adversity. Where others would be 
pinched for lack of warmth and cheer these 
draw nourishment and stimulant from se- 
verity. It must be a fascinating thing to 
watch the growth of flowers which have a 
preference for the gloom. These flowers 
would not lift their heads to the meridian 
sun; they are children of the shadow, and 
they are wooed by the twilight and the 
shade. 


197 


198 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


And there are similar things in the world 
of the spirit. They only reveal themselves 
in hard circumstances. They come out when 
material circumstances become stern and 
severe. They grow in the gloom. For how 
can we otherwise explain some of the experi- 
ences of the Apostle Paul? Here he is in 
captivity at Rome. The supreme mission 
of his life appears to be broken. His mis- 
sionary career is ended. He has no longer 
the stimulus of travel, the joy of his sublime 
itinerary, the joy of carrying the good news 
of grace over the highways and byways of 
Asia and Greece. The open road is narrowed 
down to servitude. Gloom has settled upon 
his lot, but it is just in this besetting dingi- 
ness that flowers begin to show their faces in 
bright and fascinating glory. He may have 
seen them before, growing on the open road, 
but never as they now appeared in incom- 
parable strength and beauty. Words of 
promise opened out their treasures as he had 
never seen them before. They were now 
like the expanded fulness of a rose as com- 
pared with the imprisoned mystery of the 
bud. Even Providence itself revealed new 
intimacies in his penury, and he discovered 


A GARDEN IN THE GLOOM 199 


deepening wonders in the fellowship. There 
was a flower named Recollection which never 
unfolded such treasures in the sunlight as it 
now revealed in the gloom. Forgotten mer- 
cles reappeared, and in such a way as to dis- 
close new aspects of heavenly grace. And, 
strangely enough, the flower called Hope 
flourished in amazing luxuriance; the apostle 
named it ‘‘the Hope of Glory.’’ And 
Human Kindnesses, which once were per- 
haps seen but dimly, were now clothed in 
loveliness. Perhaps the kindness showed 
itself in a visit from Onesimus, a runaway 
slave, or perhaps in some tender remem- 
brance from friends at Philippi or Corinth. 
In one way or other the gloomy season be- 
came the home of spiritual graces, and the 
dingy corner inspired the most wonderful 
experiences of his life. 

But of all the things which revealed them- 
selves in this period of gloom there were 
none which compared with what the apostle 
ealled ‘‘the unsearchable riches of Christ.’’ 
These riches revealed themselves in amaz- 
ing brilliance, like the brightness of the stars 
on nights when there is no moon in the sky. 
And among these treasures were such won- 


200 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


derful things as the grace of Christ, and 
the love of Christ, and the joy of Christ, and 
the peace of Christ, and it seemed as though 
they almost needed an ‘‘encircling gloom”’ 
to draw out their secret and their inner 
glory. At any rate the realm of gloom be- 
came the home of revelation, and Paul began 
to realise as never before the range and 
wealth of his spiritual inheritance. And so 
while some of his friends were referring to 
his misery he was singing of his joy; while 
they spoke of his tribulation he exulted in 
‘fa peace which passeth understanding’’; 
while they piteously regretted his poverty 
he boasted of ‘‘possessing all things.’’ ‘‘I 
have all things and abound!”’ 

Some men become very poor when they 
are imprisoned in tight corners. When we 
reach the desert places in life the great ques- 
tion is this: ‘‘ What have we got to live on?’’ 
And our means consist very largely of our 
savings and our storings. This man Paul 
had been laying up treasures in Heaven, and 
these treasures befriended and comforted 
him in his gloom. There are some folk, who, 
when they get old, or when they come to 
lonely places, have a dismal and wintry lot. 


A GARDEN IN THE GLOOM 201 


They live with very cheerless associates. 
Their own animosities crowd about them. 
They live with their own peevishness, and 
their sourness, and their fretfulness, and 
their censoriousness, and their unthankful- 
ness, and their little-mindedness! What a 
menagerie of ugly things! And yet in multi- 
tudes of lives they constitute the only com- 
pany when the sun goes down, and the cold 
evening wind blows about them, and they are 
left alone. 

On the other hand, who has not known 
men and women who when they arrive at sea- 
sons of gloom and solitude put on strength 
and hopefulness like a robe? ‘They have 
lovely things to live with. They have their 
own old loyalties. They have sweet memo- 
ries which come freighted with rich cargoes 
from far-off years. They have large sym- 
pathies which keep them young, and which 
preserve their leaf from withering. They 
have sunny alluring visions. And far more 
wonderful than all these, in their humble lot 
there comes another Bethlehem, in which the 
Lord of Glory inearnates himself in hallow- 
ing power and peace. 

You may imprison such folk where you 


202 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


please, you shut up their treasure with them. 
You cannot shut it out. You may make their 
material lot a desert, but the wilderness and 
the solitary place shall be glad, and the desert 
shall rejoice and blossom like the rose. 


LIIT 
THE PLACE OF UNVEILING 


‘“‘That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all 
pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and in- 
creasing in the knowledge of God.’’—Cot. i. 10. 


First of all we see a pilgrim on a journey, 
keeping to the appointed path with vigilant 
fideity. Then we see his spirit illumined 
as by some mystical dawn. An inward light 
appears ‘‘which keeps the way before him 
always bright.’? He enters into a fuller 
knowledge of God. And the great matter to 
notice is this—the revelation comes to him 
onthe road. The holy light meets the travel- 
ler. We do not talk ourselves into the 
knowledge of the Lord; we walk into it. We 
start out for something, we venture upon 
some errand, we accept some commission of 
Christian service, and the enlightening min- 
istry joins us on the road, and we become 
light in the Lord. ‘‘Light is sown for the 
righteous,’’ and they reap the shining har- 
vest as they go along the way. We ‘‘walk 
203 


204 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


worthy of the Lord,’’ and we thereby ‘‘in- 
crease in the knowledge of God.’’ Yes, we 
walk into the larger day. 

But there are great differences in the 
walkers, and therefore there are great differ- 
ences in the measures of their spiritual 
knowledge and enlightenment. Mr. Fearing 
and Valiant-for-Truth were both on the 
same road, and they were going in the same 
direction, but what a contrast in the style 
of their walking! Valiant-for-Truth had a 
fine stride as he swung along the road in pur- 
pose and song. Mr. Fearing was nervous 
and tremulous, uncertain about the Lord’s 
promises, and uncertain about the divine 
provision. The character of our walk has 
much to do with our enlightenment. Val- 
iant-for-Truth was on the look-out for 
opportunities of service. His road was to 
him an unending series of possible doors. 
Mr. Fearing was looking for traps, and 
snares, and pit-falls! And so while Valiant- 
for-Truth stepped forward into an ever- 
brightening dawn, Mr. Fearing trudged 
along in perpetual twilight. 

But if we are to walk into the light, our 
walk must not only be one of obedience; 


THE PLACE OF UNVEILING 205 


it must be one of communion. We must 
not only walk in love, we must walk with 
God. And in this traveling companionship 
we can both speak and listen. We must 
neither be deaf nor dumb. The great Com- 
panion, who walked with the two disciples 
to Emmaus, listened to them as they told 
him their disappointments and fears; and 
they listened to Him as He talked with them 
by the way. As they walked and talked 
their hearts began to glow with a strange 
burning. ‘‘Did not our hearts burn within 
us?’’?’ And then the burning changed into 
a shining, and they knew Him; He was 
made known unto them in the breaking of 
bread. Walk and know! 


LIV 
THE POWER OF DARKNESS 


‘“Who hath delivered us from the power of dark- 
ness.’’—Co.. 1. 13. 


In his book, Polar Travel, Admiral Peary 
makes a very striking statement on the 
greatest trial in Arctic exploration. He 
says that whereas to nine out of ten people 
the word ‘‘polar’’ is synonymous with cold, 
to one who has spent a year within the Arc- 
tic or Antarctic it is more likely to be 
synonymous with darkness. ‘‘A man of the 
most sanguine temperament cannot avoid 
entirely the effects of months of polar night, 
and there are those of a nervous tempera- 
ment whom a night in the Arctic would drive 
insane.”’ 

There are other zones beside the Arctic 
where the power of darkness is appalling. 
If the darkness be unrelieved, a long night- 
time in the soul can break a life to pieces. 
Indeed, that is a phrase which we frequently 


use to describe the condition of people whose 
206 


THE POWER OF DARKNESS 207 


sorrow clings about them like a heavy night 
without a star, and without a friendly glint 
of coming dawn. We say they are ‘‘going 
all to pieces!’’ Their finer faculties become 
anemic; they whiten and sicken like plants 
imprisoned in a dark cellar. Their emotions 
become burdensome weights when they were 
purposed to be wings. They are weighed 
down when they should be lifted up. Sweet 
things in the soul turn sour, like a room 
which is shut up from light and air. The 
whole life loses its healthy balance and fine 
proportions, and all because the darkness 
has deprived it of the sense of space and far 
horizons. 

I think that one of the great perils of 
the present time is in this paralysing power 
of darkness. The world is full of sorrows. 
Millions are walking in the gloomy shadow 
of death, or in the almost equally oppressive 
gloom of the fear of death. The terrible 
gusts of our day are blowing out many 
friendly lights! How, then, shall it be with 
the darkness? Shall it be a hostile darkness 
which induees spiritual paralysis, or shall it 
be a strangely pervaded darkness which is 
the servant of a sovereign hope and peace? 


208 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


There is here a great call for the saving 
ministries of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Never was the believer in Christ more privi- 
leged with opportunities of service. It is 
our ministry, in Christ Jesus, ‘‘to give light 
to them that sit in darkness.’’ Weare called 
to go here and there as lamplighters on dark 
roads. ‘‘Let the redeemed of the Lord say 
so!’? We are to retell the old story of re- 
deeming love and grace. We are to tell it 
with quiet confidence as those who know and 
believe it. And it is amazing what one can 
do, who has the assurance of faith, in steady- 
ing doubtful and trembling hearts! It is 
amazing what one confident soul can do 
among a whole shipful of panic-stricken folk 
when he quietly says, ‘‘Sirs, be of good cheer, 
I believe God!’’ The watchman on the 
mountain, with his good news of breaking 
day, gives heart to everybody in the dark- 
ened vale. ‘‘In Thy light have we seen 
light.”’ 


LV 
SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE 


‘‘Which are a shadow of things to come, but the 
body is Christ.’’—Cou. ii. 17. 


Proressor William James, in a glowing 
eulogy of Miss Jane Addams, used the 
phrase, ‘‘She inhabits reality.’’ He meant, 
I suppose, that she does not spend her 
energies in merely vaporous enterprises. 
Her life is not frittered away in one pro- 
longed dream about things. She is not al- 
ways about to do something: she gets things 
done. She is not satisfied to merely study 
the railway time-table as to how places can 
be reached: she makes the journey. She is 
not for ever theorising in seclusion about 
humanity: she gets among men and women. 
She does not live and move in a phantom 
world, a filmy kingdom of abstractions: she 
inhabits reality. 

This eulogistic phrase, which Professor 


James so uses about Jane Addams, may 
209 


210 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


wisely be given a more inclusive applica- 
tion. In the urgent concerns of religion, 
how prone we are to live in the shadows, 
and not in the substances of things! We re- 
main in the unsatisfying phantoms: we do 
not abide in reality. We do not pass 
through the shadow into the substance. 
For, in the realm of religion, material 
things are the shadows. The visible and 
the tangible and the transient thorough- 
fares lead into the glorious temple of the 
Unseen, the holy sanctuary of the real and 
eternal. We take the bread and the wine 
at the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, 
but the material emblems are only the shad- 
ows of the heavenly feast. If our journey- 
ing soul tarry with these we do not inhabit 
reality, we are in the realm of phantoms, 
however seemingly impressive the service 
may be. The substance is Christ, and it is 
only as our soul reverently presses forward 
to the spiritual bread and wine that we pass 
into the august realities of the Sacrament. 
And so it is with all external ministries, 
and with every ecclesiastical and devotional 
ordinance and institution. We must distin- 
guish between the shadow and the sub- 


SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE 211 


stance, or leanness will come into our souls. 

Indeed, in the only truly vital sense of 
the words, we never inhabit reality until 
we abide in Christ. And yet, how we do 
dwell in the shadows, and how we pursue 
them! But when at last we do enter into 
our Dwelling-place, there is a strange and 
wonderful sense of home. It is not that 
our quest is ended when we make our home 
in the Lord: it has only just begun. We 
are at rest for quest; we are like mineral 
explorers who have found the precious loca~ 
tion, and who have just sunk their shaft 
into the buried wealth. We too have found 
our Mine, and there stretch before us the 
endless veins of the unsearchable riches of 
Christ. We have discovered Reality. 
Everything else is a shadow—this alone is 
Substance. ‘‘Thou, O Christ, art all I 
want!”’ 


LVI 
LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


“‘Tf ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things 
which are above.’’—Co.. iii. 1. 
THis chapter in Colossians, which begins 
in this exalted communion, ends in de- 
scribing the Christian life of a slave. I 
think it was Spurgeon who used to say that 
the chapter begins in the heavenlies and 
ends in the kitchen. But it is not so much 
the wide sweep of the thought which is so 
startling as the fact that the thought never 
descends. The heavenly places and the 
kitchen are at the same elevation. The 
apostle did not come down from the mount 
to talk about employers and employed. He 
was still in ‘‘Christ Jesus,’’ and all these 
human fellowships were regarded in the 
lofty relationship of the Lord. All earthly 
interests were lifted up into the heaven- 
hes; ; everything was adjusted in divine come. 
munion, and so everything became one of 


the ‘ayes which are above. 
212 


LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 218 


And so it happens that Paul’s evangelical 
life is not at one height and his practical 
life at another. We sometimes divide his 
letters into the doctrinal and the practical, 
and we regard the doctrinal as mountainous 
alpine country, while the practical life finds 
a meaner symbol in the valleys and the 
plains. I do not think that this symbolism 
expresses elther the Apostle’s thought or 
feeling. He gets up into the high moun- 
tains even when he is dealing with a matter 
of seemingly comparative indifference. In 
his letter to the Corinthians, and after the 
magnificent unveilings of the fifteenth chap- 
ter, we are confronted with the sudden 
transition, ‘‘Now as touching the collec- 
tion!’? But that is not a precipitous de- 
scent, it is only a sharp turning on moun-. 
tain heights, keeping the same elevation. 
The Apostle does not say, ‘‘Now to leave 
these great themes, and to descend to some- 
thing practical! I am very sorry, but we 
must attend to these material things! We 
eannot at the shrine remain!’’ No, that 
was not his reasoning. The common life 
was raised to the height of the resurrection- 
life in Christ. An ordinary collection 


214 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


formed part of the retinue of the glorious 
ministries of redemption, and shared the 
power of the resurrection. 

We are never vitally right, and we never 
enter into robust spiritual life, until we 
have something of this magnificent inclu- 
siveness, and make everything part of the 
glorious mountain-country of the risen life 
in Christ our Lord. We must regard the 
lowly concerns of our daily walk and con- 
versation as being vitally related to the 
heavenlies, and we must daringly believe 
that we can discharge the humblest duty 
while still breathing the air of the moun- 
tain-tops. 


LVII 
UNLEARNING THINGS 
‘‘Put ye off all these.’’—Cou. iil. 8. 


Bur this is a tremendous business, the 
putting off of things! There is nothing 
more difficult. What can be thought of 
which is more difficult than to drop a way 
of thinking, or to alter a way of speaking, 
or to change a way of acting? How diffi- 
cult it is to put off something which has 
become a habit! How severe is the task of 
taking some way, which has become one 
of life’s grooves and smoothing it out until 
there is no mark that it has ever been! 
When we have learned a wrong way of do- 
ing a thing it is a fearfully heavy business 
to unlearn it. For instance, when we have 
Jearned a wrong way of using our voice, 
what a business it is to unlearn it! How 
difficult is the task, when a young violinist 
has acquired a wrong pose of the wrist, to 


undo the twist and to get the right one! 
215 


216 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


How severe is the business of unlearning 
the wrong way of handling a golf club! 
These are all biases and inclinations of the 
body and it is a difficult thing to put them 
away. But the difficulty becomes enor- 
mously greater when the false thing is 
mental, or emotional, a perversity of mind 
or of mood. ‘‘Let the wicked forsake his 
way, and the unrighteous man _ his 
thoughts.’’ Forsaking a false habit in golf 
is as nothing to forsaking a false habit of 
the soul. But just because it is so very dif- 
ficult it is a ministry which serves our 
health and strength. It makes moral 
muscle, and clothes the spirit with heavenly 
vigour. 

Dr. Horace Bushnell had a very dear 
friend, Dr. Dutton, whose gracious frank- 
ness was a vital part of his worth. In one 
of his letters this sentence occurs: ‘‘ Indeed, 
I have thought of late that you have made 
decided improvement in what Willis calls 
unlearning contempt.’’ Yes, and such un- 
learning would be a fine register of the pro- 
gress of the soul. To be unlearning an 
unhealthy accomplishment in contempt, and 
to unwind its bondage as one would unwind 


UNLEARNING THINGS 217 


a spool of thread, is a moral exercise which 
would reveal itself in an emancipating in- 
fluence over the entire life. 

And it is even so with the habit of cen- 
soriousness, even when it is not so matured 
as to have become soured into cynicism. 
The habit of supercilious criticism, of judg- 
ing everybody as from a throne, issuing 
severe judgments in tones of final decree— 
no task in our schooldays presents the dif- 
ficulty which we encounter when we begin 
to unlearn habits like these. Indeed, it is 
something like taking a closely woven 
fabric and unravelling it so as to pick out 
the rotten threads. Unlearning is the most 
difficult of all learning. 

The apostle has this in mind when he 
offers us the counsel, ‘‘ Put ye off all these.”’ 
It is the figure of the removal of a gar- 
ment, and if it were as easy as throwing off 
a loose Oriental robe we should have no 
trouble. But in life the garments of the 
soul have the intimacy and tenacity of 
skins, and to remove them is like peeling 
away a vital texture. But, by the wonder- 
ful grace of God, this putting off of deadly 
things is not altogether a negative act, like 


218 ~LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


the removal of a garment. Indeed, what is 
negative is a secondary thing, and it fol- 
lows what is positive. We have first to 
‘‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ.’’ The fig- 
ure is almost fiercely Oriental, but we know 
what it means. We can point to periods 
in our life when we put on a friendship, 
when we began to wear the love of a man 
or a woman, and we were clad in power like 
a robe. And by faith we can put on the 
Lord Jesus so that our whole life is covered 
by Him, as though some Oriental garment 
were flowing around us, and we were 
wrapped in its folds from head to feet. We 
ean become clothed in His holiness, His 
grace, His love, His strength. We can 
become invested with these things In mar- 
vellous completeness. ‘‘He hath covered 
me with the robe of righteousness and with 
the garment of salvation.”’ 

And it is when we have ‘‘put on the new 
man’’ that we can set to work to ‘‘put off 
the old man.’? When we have begun to 
learn of Him we can begin to unlearn the 
things we ought never to have learned. 
The two things go together. We can work 


UNLEARNING THINGS 219 


out our own salvation because God worketh 
in us to will and to do of His good pleas- 
ure. We can unlearn contempt, and every 
other vicious thing, as we take His yoke 
upon us and learn of Him. 


LVIII 
THE INDWELLING WORD 


“‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.’’ 


COL TH.) Gets 


First of all, let us literally carry out the 
Apostle’s counsel. Let us go among the 
words of the Lord Jesus exploring for the 
word. For the treasure which we are seek- 
ing is described in the singular number—it 
is ‘‘the word’’; and the hiding-place of 
the word is described in the plural number, 
‘‘the words.’’ The words offer us a varied 
field for exploration, and the object of our 
quest is the essential word which is hidden 
in their depth. ‘T’o be an explorer in this 
field is not merely to be busy with the 
words, reading them with diligence, or 
committing them to memory. That would 
be as if I were to bury myself among a 
gathered pile of purses, feeling their mate- 
rial, tracing their patterns, observing the 
grace and novelty of their designs, and yet 


never opening them to find the treasure 
| 220 


THE INDWELLING WORD 221 


which may be hiding in the secret pocket. 
It would be as if I were to handle a pile 
of oyster shells, turning them over and 
over, noting their shapes and their individ- 
ual lines and features, and yet never to 
open them in quest of a possible pearl. I 
am to go among the words of Christ looking 
for the word which is the pearl of great 
price. 

And this cannot be done hurriedly. We 
eannot rush through a chapter of words, 
and come out of it laden with the word. It 
is the reward of patient and leisurely move- 
ment. I very well remember Dr. Joseph 
Parker advising me in my early ministry 
never to ‘‘gallop’’ through the Scriptures. 
‘Go slowly, and look around!’’ What do 
motorists see of the wayside flowers when 
they are scorching along at thirty or forty 
miles an hour? And what do they hear 
of the songs of birds, or what do they 
see of the movements of the shy, graceful 
things which only venture out when every- 
thing is quiet and still? The ‘‘word’’ is 
the surprise which is given to the soul 
which moves with reverent and unhasty 
steps. If we rush along we shall miss it. 


222 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


Sometimes the word is hidden in a para- 
ble, and I am to find the living thing 
eradled in folds and garments of deftest 
imagery. And sometimes the word is con- 
cealed in words which the Master spoke to 
another, and I am to listen with a sort of 
over-listening, a kind of eager eavesdrop- 
ping, to see if there is anything meant for 
me. Sometimes the word is veiled in a 
work. Some deed of the Master’s is a 
medium of revelation. Or it may be only 
a look or an attitude or a gesture—and the 
word I am seeking is to be found in their 
inner significance. Sometimes the word is 
conveyed in a disciple’s letter, a letter 
written to the Romans, or to the Ephesians, 
or to a few folk at Colosse or at Philippi, 
and I am to read it very carefully, reading 
also between the lines, if perchance I may 
find the abiding truth which is the light of 
the ages, and which is the lamp for the 
doings and goings of our own day. In all 
these many fields the treasure is hid, and if 
I am to find it the Master says I must 
have all my wits about me. I am to be as 
alert as a merchantman. I am to be as 
wakeful and busy as a speculator who has 


THE INDWELLING WORD 223 


found a treasure in a field and who gives 
himself no rest until he has made a pur- 
chase and the land is his. It is in this 
spirit and with this passion I am to go in 
search of the ‘‘word of Christ.’’ 

And I am to let the word of Christ 
“dwell”? in me. The word is not to be a 
transient thing, going in at one ear and out 
of the other, like a caller who just stays for 
an hour and then continues his journey. 
This word is to dwell with us, to settle 
down with us to make its home in the inner 
room of the soul. I¢ is to live with us in 
the privacies of our being where our own 
word is born, and where our own words 
take life and shape and quality. And the 
word of Christ is to dwell there as a men- 
tor, aS a monitor, nay, as a creator, deter- 
mining my word, and my words, and my 
work, and so fashioning their very virtue 
and expression that they will reincarnate 
the life and spirit of the Lord. The divine 
word is to dwell within me so as to make 
the tenant divine. 

And the word is to dwell within me 
““richly.’’ It is not to be on the same level 
with other things, one of a fellowship of 


224 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


commoners who belong to the same rank. 
It is to be of an altogether different degree 
and quality. It is to be like some superb 
and royal presence, moving with authority 
and grace. ‘The word of the Lord is to 
dwell in the soul with rich and rare distine- 
tion. And just because the word is so 
exalted, just because it is so rich and glori- 
ous it enriches everything it touches with 
something of its own distinction. This is 
the real philosopher’s stone; it transforms 
’ everything into spiritual gold. It endows 
everything with divine’ quality—our 
thoughts, our wishes, our affections, our 
purposes, our actions—it touches every- 
thing into gold. 

When Charles Kingsley was first mar- 
ried, and set up a home, he and his wife 
sought out all the words in the New Testa- 
ment which in any way declared the Lord’s 
will about masters and servants. How 
should they treat their servants? What 
should be the manner of their relationship ? 
What said the word? And so they sought 
in the words and found the word, and the 
word of the Lord dwelt in them richly. 
It got into the kitchen, and it changed ordi- 


THE INDWELLING WORD 225 


nary severities into gracious courtesies, it 
transformed harshness into gentleness, and 
cold reserves into tender and enduring inti- 
macies. And perhaps it would be no sur- 
prise to my readers to learn that when 
Charles Kingsley died, all the servants in 
the house had lived with him through 
periods ranging from seventeen to twenty- 
six years! 


LIX 
SPIRITUAL DISTINCTION 


“Let your speech be always with graee.’’ 
Cou. iv. 6. 


In the apostle’s word the counsel is limited 
to the ministry of speech. But in truth it 
has a much wider application, and is so 
inclusive as to comprehend all the issues 
of our life. All the active expressions of 
the soul, whether of speech, or of looks, or 
of gesture, or of demeanour, or manners, or 
deed, are to be distinguished by a certain 
heavenly grace which is to bear witness that 
we are in alliance with the Lord of grace 
and glory. In the ranks of genuine aris- 
tocracy there is an air of fine breeding, dis- 
played in unconsciousness and in natural 
ease, which tells the story of birth and high 
lineage. And in a far more distinguished 
sense the Christian is to reveal a grace, 
which is one of the marks of the Lord 


Jesus, and which endows all the expressions 
' 226 


SPIRITUAL DISTINCTION 227 


of his life with an indefinable but most at- 
tractive charm. It is one of the birth- 
marks of the highest aristocracy, that lofty 
fellowship which is ‘‘born, not of blood, nor 
of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of 
man, but of God.”’ 

Let us see how this grace is revealed. 
I suppose that, of all difficult things, one of 
the most difficult is to be a graceful loser. 
Even in the comparatively small matter of 
games it is a very fine distinction to be 
able to lose with grace. But, indeed, to 
lose anything, and yet visibly retain the 
grace of the Lord Jesus, reveals a wonder- 
fully arresting character, and the compel- 
ling charm is all the greater as the things 
we lose excel in value. To lose money and 
not lose one’s grace is a noble attainment. 
To lose health, and to keep the grace of the 
Lord Jesus, is nobler still. To lose our 
loved ones, and in our dull bereavement to 
retain the holy grace like starlight in the 
night—that is surely the noblest of all. 
Yes, the people who can be graceful losers 
are marked with great distinction. They 
must evidently belong to the spiritual aris- 
tocracy. 


228 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


And yet there is, perhaps, something 
higher still.) A. friend writing of Lord 
Eleho, who was killed in Egypt, gives this 
very impressive testimony: ‘‘He achieved 
the infinitely exacting role of felicitous 
winner incomparably well.’”’ That is a 
great phrase, and it is a great eulogium on 
the young soldier to whom warfare was a 
holy crusade. He was a felicitous winner! 
His finest triumphs were carried with a 
still finer grace. Hverybody else shares in 
such triumphs; we feel they are ours as 
much as his. Some winners are very un- 
attractive. Their success makes them 
proud, and pride is always exclusive, and 
no one wants to come near their fire. They 
have it all to themselves. But it is a very 
beautiful thing, and it is a commanding 
witness, when success of any kind does 
not mar us, and we are unspoilt by ‘‘the 
destruction that wasteth at noonday.”’ 
When grace thus abounds in all the issues 
of our life the people who deal with us 
begin to inquire about our fountains, and 
they are led to the eternal spring, even 
to ‘‘the grace of our Lord and Saviour 
Jesus Christ.”’ 


LX 
THE GIFT OF SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT 


‘““Those who have their senses exercised to discern 
both good and evil.’’—Hekn. v. 14. 


THERE are grades of spiritual discernment. 
There are undisciplined senses which can 
detect only presumptuous sins and have 
no perception of secret faults. They can 
apprehend the sin which lodges in some 
glaring crime, but they cannot appreciate 
the sin which hides in the spirit of an age. 
At one of the Royal Society’s meetings Mr. 
Astor exhibited a micro-balance, all built 
up of quartz fibres, each as fine as a spider’s 
web, the purpose of which is to discern 
and weigh the faintest traces of gas. 

And. we are purposed by the Lord to have 
an analogous endowment in the soul. A 
comparatively coarse conscience can regis- 
ter the sin of drunkenness, but it requires 
more exquisite feelers to discern a faint 
but deadly gas, a corrupting spirit, the 
' 229 


230 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


iniquity which can hide in an atmosphere. 
And yet it is in these aerial forms that sin 
is most commonly met. Days and weeks 
pass by and we may never meet it in the 
shape of some fierce and distinctive pas- 
sion, but every hour it rides upon the 
wings of the wind. Only now and again 
do we meet our enemy as a roaring lion, 
but we continually meet him as ‘‘the prince 
of the power of the air.’”’ We may escape 
the lion, we cannot escape the atmosphere. 
To be able to discern the faintest trace of 
gas is one of the conditions of spiritual 
Immunity. 

Now we are never so much alert to bad 
air as when we have been breathing good 
air. If we come out of a crowded room, 
and fill our lungs with the fresh, clean 
air, and then return to the room, we are 
keenly sensitive to the poisoned atmosphere 
within. We must continually draw in 
breath in the fear of the Lord, and be 
filled with the Holy Ghost, if we would be 
able to discern the deadly gases of insidious 
worldliness. The soul must be constantly 
refreshed if she is to retain the freshness 
of her perceptions. It is only the soul that 


GIFT OF SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT 231 


knows God which has an instant recogni- 
tion of the ungodly. Atmospheres reveal 
their secrets, and the noxious breath is 
dispersed before it has begun its destruc- 
tive work. 


LXI 
WIND AND SAIL 
‘“Let us go on unto perfection.’’—Hkgs. vi. 1. 


SucH is the Authorised Version of the 
Apostle’s words. But a literal translation 
would be given in this phrase: ‘‘Let us be 
borne on unto perfection,’’ and the differ- 
ence is profoundly significant. The one 
leaves us too much in the nakedness of our 
own effort; the other introduces’ the 
friendly co-operative might of the eternal 
God. One leaves us faint in endeavour; 
the other inspires us with all-sufficient re- 
source. One engages our attention to the 
oars; the other reminds us of a favourable 
wind. The one emphasises works, and the 
other emphasises grace. The latter calls 
us to put ourselves in certain preparatory 
conditions, and the great trade-winds of 
God will do the rest. We shall be ‘‘borne 
on unto perfection.’’ 


Now our religious life too frequently 
| 239 


WIND AND SAIL 233 


dwells in the earlier version, and it is lack- 
ing in serenity and inspiration. Our reli- 
gion becomes an extra piece of baggage 
which we have to carry instead of being 
an extra power to make our burden light. 
It weights us with impedimenta instead of 
endowing us with wings. We are in the 
atmosphere of commandments, and the be- 
atitudes are ignored. We live in the severe 
house of the law when we might live in the 
radiant home of grace. Our statutes do 
not break into songs. We give more evi- 
dence of struggle than we do of new and 
glorious fellowship. We do not impress 
the world as though we had received 
strange and secret additions to our 
strength. We are not like a sailing boat 
which has just been caught in the sweep 
of a friendly wind and is being borne 
along joyfully to its desired haven. 

And yet it is this evidence of a heavenly 
trade-wind which is our most arresting 
witness for the Lord. We are no good 
unless we manifest superior resource. If 
we are just as overdone as the children of 
the world, just as full of labour in hard 
- rowing, just as easily exhausted, we offer 


234 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


no recommendation for our faith. Our 
witness is to be found in the reality of a 
mystic current, in the breath of God, in 
the power of the Holy Spirit. We must 
make it plain to the world that there is 
more wind in our sails, more water in our 
mill-stream, more engine-power in our 
machinery. Our witness must be in ‘‘the 
demonstration of the power of the Spirit.’’ 
And to this end we must lay hold of the 
passive as well as the active aspects of the 
Apostle’s word; we must not only ‘‘go on,’’ 
we must be ‘‘borne on unto perfection.”’’ 
We must be ‘‘strengthened in the grace 
which is in Christ Jesus.’ 


LXIT 
THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT 


‘‘See that thou make all things according to the 
pattern showed to thee in the mount.’’—HEs. viii. 5. 


THarT is the secret of all progress. An ugly 
fact is seen in the light of its ideal, and the 
work of reform is begun. Some man has 
seen the pattern in the mount, and he 
brings the glowing rectitude and places it 
side by side with familiar realities, and 
he exposes their crookedness and fatal 
alienation. ‘‘Repent,’’ he cries, and in obe- 
dience to his word and vision a revolution 
is born. It is when the pattern in the 
mount is lost, or when it has been forgot- 
ten, or when we have deliberately hid it 
away that we fall into an indolent content- 
ment. When the shining, convicting pat- 
tern is missing we become ‘‘at ease in 
Zion,’’ and foul and ugly things are un- 
disturbed. Crooked happenings do not 
distress us. Nay, they appear as the quite 
natural and companionable furniture of 


235 


286 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


our lives. Wronged people do not arrest 
or alarm us because we do not see their 
angels as in the presence of our Father in 
heaven. We must see the heavenly pattern 
if we would see the earthly perversion of 
our Father’s will. 

If, therefore, we would have a period of 
wise revolution we must have a preparatory 
period of wise revelation. All healthy rev- 
olution in spirit and in circumstance, in 
character and in conduct, must begin in the 
glory of spiritual vision. ‘‘Where there is 
no vision the people perish.’’ But where 
the vision is given and welcomed there 
will be the health of disquietude, and we 
shall begin to have the stirrings of a new 
day in movements of desire and will, and 
in the awaking energies of agitation and 
action. 

And what is to be our pattern in the 
mount except the holy mind of Jesus 
Christ? If in all matters of right and 
wrong, matters of moral principle, we seek 
the mind of Christ, we shall surely have 
before us the pattern in the mount. What 
does Christ think about the poor? What 
does He think about their rights? What 


THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT 237 


is His pattern for holy dealing? And has 
He any pattern for marriage? And what 
is the ideal in glory concerning the pur- 
posed stature of every man? And what is 
His ideal as to the relation of races, the 
fellowship of all the tribes and peoples 
which jostle one another on the planet? 
And so with countless other questions 
which we might ask in the holy mount. 
We should find that the patterns would 
be given. | 

Sometimes fhe patterns are given to us 
with amazing brilliancy. Sometimes a pat- 
tern is made to blaze in the soul of some 
man or woman in lines of fire. It burns in 
the very texture of their being, and it 
kindles their awakened spirit into vehement 
speech and action. These are our prophets. 
They can say with Jeremiah—‘‘There is 
in mine heart as it were a burning fire 

. and I cannot contain!’’ Their eyes 
have seen ‘‘the dawning of the glory of the 
Lord.’’: They have received the pattern in 
the mount, and they dare not be disobedient 
to the heavenly vision. And that is the 
first necessity of our day, to seek the pat- 
tern in the mount. 


LXITI 
OUR VOICE AFTER DEATH 
‘‘He being dead yet speaketh.’’—Hep. xi. 4. 


WE go on speaking after we are dead. 
That is a very solemn thought. What will 
be the character of the voice with which we 
shall speak? What will ou? life continue 
to say in the lives and remembrances of 
others? The continuing voice has some- 
times been described as the echo of the life 
and shares its character. But it is far 
other than that. An echo is only a weak 
and weakening continuance of the original 
voice, and it speedily passes into unob- 
served and unregistered silence. But death 
does not change life’s voice into a fading 
echo. The life itself persists, vital and 
positive, radiating quickening or deadening 
influence. Death does not change charac- 
ter, and character never loses its contagion. 
We live on, and after death the influence 


of our life is what it was before. The 
238 


OUR VOICE AFTER DEATH 239 


quality of the river is unchanged, whether 
its waters be clear and pure as crystal, or 
the vehicles of the most nauseous corrup- 
tion. ‘‘He that is holy, let him be holy 
still; he that is unrighteous, let him be un- 
righteous still.’’ 

If, therefore, we would know with what 
kind of voice we shall continue to speak 
after death, we need only consider the char- 
acter of our life. I do not mean our repu- 
tation. A man’s reputation may seem to 
represent his influence, but it is by no 
means the main current of his life. Repu- 
tation is like an outer garment which we 
can frequently change; it may be changed 
a dozen times in the course of seventy 
years. But character is an inner garment, 
whose texture is woven by thought, and 
feeling, and desire, and action; and this 
garment is not exposed to the fickle whims 
of men or the ecaprice of circumstance. 
Happy the man who is clothed in the robe 
of righteousness and the garment of sal- 
vation! It is that inner self, our very self, 
with its own abiding purpose and devotion, 
which determines what happens in the way 
of continuance when death removes us 


240 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


from our visible place among the children 
of men. ‘‘He being dead yet speaketh!’’ 

All this is very solemn. And it would 
be overwhelming if we knew no way by 
which our lives may be made pure and 
harmonious, and, even now, able to radiate 
influences which will help to sweeten and 
inspire our fellow-men. But the secret has 
been unveiled to us, and we know the way. 
Our Saviour had His own wonderful figure 
of speech which no one else could employ. 
‘“The water that L shall give him shall be 
in him a well of water springing up into 
everlasting life.’? And from that infilling 
there results an overflowing. From that 
well there flows a river. ‘‘Out of him shall 
flow rivers of water,’’ irrigating and fertil- 
ising the lives of others. Death does not 
dry up that living well, and therefore 
death does not dry up the river. The river 
fiows from the living well, and therefore 
death does not stop the flowing! And so 
with the river of John, and of Paul! And 
so it will be with thy river and mine! 


LXIV 
GOD’S ENJOYMENT OF HIS CHILDREN _ 
‘‘He pleased God.’’—Hksp. xi. 5. | 


WE are in the habit of thinking, perhaps 
not unduly, but with a certain lack of 
proportion, on the joy which our Father 
gives to His children. There is a com- 
plementary relationship which we are apt 
to forget and which reveals our power to. 
give pleasure to God. It seems incredible 
that we can do anything to God Almighty, 
and more especially that we can enrich 
the treasures of His joys. A false or im- 
perfect, reverence makes us subdue the pre- 
sumptuous thought, and we put it under 
most vigilant suspicion. But if the rela- 
tionship of father and child is anything 
more than a name, if it is something more 
than a verbal and formal expression, if it 
is really vital and intimate, it must be like 
a highway of spiritual commerce, and the 


precious merchandise must pass in both 
241 


242 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


directions. There must be the carriage 
from father to child, and there must be a 
corresponding transport of wealth from 
child to father. On this mystic ladder there 
are ascending and descending angels, and 
both are laden with their respective bounty. 
God’s good grace can cover us with favour, 
and we can be well pleasing to God. If 
any one is in Christ Jesus, our Father will 
joyfully say to His child, ‘‘This is My be- 
loved son, in whom I am well pleased.’’ 
Well, now, God wants us to be so great 
_ that He can enjoy us. He wants us to be 
companions in whom He can delight. He 
wants to find a large hospitality in the 
cheery openness of our characters. Has 
He given us any hints as to what kind of 
greatness makes us pleasing in His pres- 
ence? I think He has, and it may be help- 
ful to look at one or two. There was one 
day when our Lord seemed to be momen- 
tarily restraining the outpouring of His 
grace. A Syro-Phceenician woman was 
pleading for help, and the answer was de- 
layed. But the woman’s heart seemed to 
grow larger in entreaty, and she marshalled 
all her powers of love in the urgency of 


GOD’S ENJOYMENT OF HIS CHILDREN 243 


her siege upon the heart of the Lord. And 
then the unwillingly hindered Fountain 
burst forth in streams of grace! ‘‘QOh, 
woman, great is thy faith!’’ That is one 
form of greatness which makes the children 
of men most pleasing companions to the 
Lord. Shall we dare to say that a great 
faith always gives the Lord the delight of 
surprise? ‘‘When Jesus saw his faith, 
He marvelled.’’ That man was a fit com- 
panion for the enjoyment of God. 

And here is another hint of the sort of 
folk who are so great that God can find 
pleasure in them. ‘‘Well done, good and 
faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful 
over a few things. I will make thee ruler 
over many things. Enter thou into the 
joy of thy Lord.’’ Who cannot feel the 
warmth of God’s enjoyment glowing in this 
gift of joy? And what had these people 
done? ‘They had done little things in a 
great way. They had been great on small 
occasions. They had lived in obscurity with 
a lofty sort of life as though the eyes of 
multitudes had been fixed upon them. They 
had put an exquisite finish on work which 
was never intended for the public gaze. 


244 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


They had been scrupulous about the scru- 
ples. They had finished the work which 
God had given them to do. And God re- 
joiced in them and called them into His 
joy as fit companions to sit with Him on 
His throne. 

And other hints are given which I ive 
not space to mention. ‘There are people 
who are great in self-forgetfulness. ‘‘When 
saw we .Thee an hungered and gave 
Thee meat?’’ How He rejoiced in the 
greatness of their companionship! But 
how is all this greatness to become ours? 
‘*No man by being anxious can add a eubit 
to his stature.’’ No, but God ean add a 
eubit to our stature. If we are only will- 
ing He will make us well-pleasing to Him- 
self. He will make us kings and priests 
unto God. ‘‘Thy gentleness hath made me 
great.”’ 


LXV 
THE GREAT VENTURES 


‘“By faith Abraham went out, not knowing whither 
he went.’’—Hes. xi. 8. 


THis word embodies the very essence of 
faith. Faith is the embarkation on un- 
known seas. I¢ is the action in faith which 
distinguishes it from mere opinion or even 
from riper conviction. Haith is more than 
a mental conclusion: it involves decision 
and movement. That is to say, it necessi- 
tates the co-operation of an active will. 
Faith is more than a verdict; it is the 
verdict carried out. It is here that many 
people fail to recognise the vital difference 
between a theological creed and a religious 
life, between a mental assent and a consent 
of the will, between belief and faith. The 
difference is something like the difference 
between the legislative and administrative 
functions in national government. In legis- 


lation laws are formulated, in administra- 
245 


246 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


tion they are carried out. Legislation is an 
abstraction, it is a matter of so many 
words. Administration takes the law into 
the common affairs of men, and determines 
their direction and destiny. Administra- 
tion is law in action. Legislation is like 
a pattern, and it may be a very useless 
thing. Administration is the same pattern 
placed in the loom, governing all its move- 
ments, and determining all the threads in 
the finished fabric. And that is something 
like the difference between mere belief, in 
the sense of mental conclusion, and faith, 
which is belief mixing with life and control- 
ling and colouring all its affairs. The vital 
element in faith is movement of the will, 
a venturing forth under the leadership of 
some great assumption, and experimenting 
with it on the wide, open seas of actual life. 
‘‘He that hath My commandments and 
keepeth them.’’ That. is the combination 
which comprises a vital faith, and that is 
vital religion. In faith there is always the 
element of obedience; it is a great venture. 

And so the real proofs in spiritual things 
can only be found in experience. We can- 
not find them in books, we meet them in 


THE GREAT VENTURES 247 


life. They are not handed to us by others, 
we discover them for ourselves. A man 
ventures forth at the bidding of the Lord, 
and as he goes along he begins to have ‘‘the 
evidence of things not seen.’’ These things 
do not come to the door of the lounger, they 
join the pilgrim as he trudges along his 
way. The living light of assurance is not 
given to Sloth or Sluggard, it is given to 
Faithful, and Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, and 
Mr. Great-heart, who are on the road early 
and late. And so we have the Master’s 
word: ‘‘He that believeth in Me shall not 
walk in darkness, he shall have the light of 
life.’”’ But note that this belief is walking, 
not merely talking; it is belief in process 
of movement, which is faith, and it is to 
this kind of valorous action that the light 
of life is promised. The vital proofs are 
given in experience. ‘‘It came to pass that 
as he went he received his sight.’? A man 
set out, at Christ’s bidding, on a very 
strange journey, and some folk laughed at 
his simplicity as he groped along his way. 
But he found his eyes, and he found his 
sight, and he looked upon his Lord. And 
so we must not wait for our proofs, we 


248 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


must go forth to meet them. In these 
regions, too, it is true that ‘‘faint heart 
never won fair lady.’’ Here, too, it is all- 
ventured, all-won. 

And thus it is that the Christian life, 
because it is a splendid venture, is also a 
bracing exploration and a magnificent dis- 
covery. 


LXVI 


PUTTING OUT ANTAGONISTIC FIRES 


‘Through faith . . . quench the violence of fire.’’ 
Hes. xi. 33, 34. 


THE writer of these words is reviewing the 
exploits of faith. He looks back over the 
wonderful road of his nation’s history, and 
the beacons of faith are so many and so re- 
splendent they seem like a land of unbroken 
light. It is like as when one stands on the 
Calton hill of Edinburgh in the darkness 
and looks along Princes Street; the sepa- 
rated street-lamps appear to run together, 
and the radiance is continuous and un- 
broken. The men and women of faith make 
a cheerful history. The writer sees their 
shining triumphs everywhere. Faith makes 
conquests in every sort of circumstance, 
mastering them all, and compelling even the 
most hostile to pay tribute. Yes, faith has 
even quenched the violence of fire. In the 
fires of martyrdom the faithful in Christ 


249 


250 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


have conquered their pains. They have 
searcely felt the flame. Cranmer bathed his 
hand in the fire as if he were bathing it in 
a mountain stream. He mastered it even 
while it destroyed him. His spirit domi- 
nated it, and stayed its violence at the fron- 
tiers of the soul. And this is the secret—we 
ean only feel what reaches the central realm 
of consciousness. If we keep anything out 
of that inner realm we destroy its violence. 
And men like Cranmer have had their con- 
sciousness so filled with the Presence of the 
glory of the Lord that there was no room 
even for the aggressive pains of destructive 
flame. Look at Stephen while he was being 
stoned. We are permitted to look into his 
consciousness. ‘‘I see the heavens opened, 
and the Son of Man sitting on the right hand 
of God.”’ That infilling glory swallowed up 
the energies of his consciousness, and left no 
dribbling remnant to receive and entertain ~ 
the pangs of death. By faith Stephen de- 
stroyed the violence of the stoning. The 
body-house was dissolving; the spiritual 
house was full of God. 

But there are other fires whose violence 
can be quenched by robust and positive 


PUTTING OUT ANTAGONISTIC FIRES 261 


faith. There is the fire of destructive pas- 
sion. Faith in God ean destroy its violence 
and can even quench the unclean flame. And 
faith does it in a very simple and effective 
way. The best way to put out a fire is to 
withdraw everything that is inflammable. 
And fires of a spiritual order resolve them- 
selves into a question of fuel. Much fuel, 
much blaze; no fuel, no blaze. ‘*Make no 
provision for the flesh to obey the lusts 
thereof.’’ That is the remedy of an empty 
wood-house. Think of that word of our 
Lord. ‘‘The prince of this world cometh 
and hath nothing in Me.’’ There was not a 
bit of fuel about on which the evil one could 
light an unclean fire. Not a bit of idle 
thought! No loose imagination! No illicit 
dream! Nota bit of wood about! And that 
is Just what faith in Jesus does; it delivers 
us from inflammable stuff which gives the 
devil his chance. Life is ‘‘tidied up,’’ and 
no fire can come nigh our dwelling. 

And then there is the fire of destructive 
temper. It is a wonderful thing to see a 
fiery temper subdued by faith, and it has 
been done a million times. But let it be re- 
membered that when God subdues this kind 


252 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


of fire it does not mean that any executive 
forces in life are destroyed. The life that 
was like a lion is not changed into a sheep. 
The energy of life is not lost; it is only 
transformed. It is a conversion of forces, 
and what used to manifest itself in a violent 
temper now reveals itself in passion of a 
nobler kind. It is one thing to have a de- 
structive fire breaking out in the parlour; it 
is quite another thing to have the same fire 
shut up in a stove in the basement, and dis- 
tributing genial and healthy heat to every 
part of the house. The violent is trans- 
formed into the gentle, but the gentleness 
is Just distributed violence, and none of the 
original power is lost. And this trans- 
formation is wrought by faith which relates 
us to Him who is the great Transformer, and 
who can purify and distribute the force of 
a bad temper, and change it into a fervent 
servant of the soul. 

And what about the fire of destructive 
gossip? And. how much there is about! 
And it is difficult to escape the flame. I 
saw a bungalow on fire the other day, an 
old-fashioned bungalow with a straw thatch. 
And when the thatch was blazing, handfuls 


PUTTING OUT ANTAGONISTIC FIRES 2538 


of burning straw were caught by the wind 
and whirled about the village, and every- 
body whose house had a thatched roof had 
all their work set to save it from destruc- 
tion. And what is much gossip but blazing 
flimsy blown about by uncharted winds? 
What is it but the fiery darts of the evil 
one? , Well, faith can meet its violence. The 
very detachment which faith gives to a life 
endows it with wonderful security. First 
of all, such a life dislikes the gossip, and it 
is a great preservative to have a healthy 
dislike. A splendid repulsion is a fine de- 
fence. A mean gossiper soon withdraws his 
flame if he encounters wet wood. And that 
is Just what faith does. It gives a sort of 
wet-wood welcome to the fiery darts, and 
the sender finds no fun in the business. It 
was this wet-wood welcome which drove 
Satan away when he sought to allure the 
Lord. ‘‘And Satan departed from Him for 
a season, and behold, angels came and min- 
istered unto Him.”’ 


LXVITL 
WITNESSES WHO GIVE EVIDENCE 


‘““We are surrounded by so great a cloud of wit- 
nesses. ’’—HEp. xii. 1. 


I cannot think that these witnesses are 
mere observers, silent lookers-on, watching 
the strenuous game which is being played by 
others. I cannot think they are like spec- 
tators at a gladiatorial show, gazing pas- 
sively upon the combatants who are wres- 
tling even unto blood in the arena below. I 
cannot think they are like the crowd who 
line the race-track and cheer the racers as 
they run. I think they are witnesses with 
a story. The witnesses have run on that 
very track, and they have won the garland 
and the palm. ‘These witnesses are old 
racers, who made the course glorious with 
their contest, and who have left a record 
which is full of inspiration. 

And therefore they are more than wit- 
nesses who can give applause, they are wit- 

254 


# 
WITNESSES WHO GIVE EVIDENCE 255 


nesses who can give evidence. They can tell 
us how they ran the race, and how they won 
it. They can tell us how they trained for 
the race. They can tell us how they nour- 
ished and inspired their spirits. They can 
tell us how they maintained their strength, 
what kind of attire they wore, and what sort 
of shoes. That is the precious worth of 
these witnesses; they are not like old mem- 
bers of the House of Commons who have 
been elevated to the peerage, and who now 
come into the Commons and sit in the gal- 
lery, and look down silently on great con- 
flicts which they are not permitted to share. 
These witnesses are more like veteran mem- 
bers of the House, ripe in exploit, and wis- 
dom, and experience, whose every word is 
deed and history, and who offer their evi- 
_ dence on the floor of the House to the youth- 
ful members who are just beginning, who 
are uncertain about their equipment, and 
who are not familiar with the course. These 
are witnesses with a story, and they offer 
themselves in evidence. 

Well, now, we are surrounded by these 
witnesses. The very air is thick with them. 
They are like a cloud in their multitude. 


256 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS —— 


‘(We are surrounded by so great a cloud of 
witnesses.’’ And every one of them has a 
story, a story of grace, the miracle of Divine 
merey aS he found it on the road, and the 
story is full of encouragement for the run- 
ner of to-day. And what we have to do is 
to listen to them. ‘‘What experience have 
you had on the road? What secrets did you 
discover? What hidden manna did you 
gather? What brooks did you find by the 
way? What light of divine revelation broke 
upon your path? Above all, what did the 
Lord of the way say to you?’’ In this way 
let us question the witnesses, the bright 
throng in the Old Testament, and the still 
brighter throng in the New. And then let 
us turn to others in the vast multitude, and 
take their eagerly offered evidence. ‘‘The 
Lord’s dealings with George Miiller.’’ Let 
that witness give his evidence. And what 
about the evidence of William Lockhart, 
the Liverpool merchant? And what about 
the evidence of Karl Cairns, and General 
Booth, and Francis Willard, and Ellice 
Hopkins, and Father Maturin, and Mr. 
Gladstone? What personal stories they 
have to tell of the grace and mercy of God! 


WITNESSES WHO GIVE EVIDENCE 2657 


-And perhaps in this ‘‘great cloud of wit- 
nesses’’ there are your own father and 
mother, or some minister of Christ who was 
to you both herald and hero, both prophet 
and priest. Listen to their evidence. They 
have wonderful things to tell us about the 
way, and about the Lord of the way, and 
about the provision which He has made for 
those who are taking that road to the Celes- 
tial City, where the glory dwelleth in Im- 
manuel’s land. And they tell us of their 
stumblings and their fallings, and how they 
were recovered from their faults. They tell 
us how things looked at the beginning of the 
road, and how things looked towards the 
end. Above all, they tell us of their fellow- 
ship with the Lord, and how His Presence 
transformed the desert into a garden, and 
changed midnight into noon. All these are 
not silent witnesses, indifferent lookers-on. 
They have something to tell us, and they 
are eager to tell it. Let them give their 
evidence. ‘‘We are surrounded by a great 
cloud of witnesses.”’ 

‘*Witnesses of Jesu’s merit, speak the 
word of power to me.’’ That is the hungry 
ery of the world. Let us bring the wit- 


258 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


nesses forward, and open the way for their 
story. Let their story be retold in our teach- 
ing and preaching, and so make it power- 
fully evidential. And to the testimony of 
others let us add our own. Let us join the 
cloud of witnesses, and let us tell our story. 
What has the Saviour done for us? What 
did He do with our sin? What was our ex- 
perience in the banqueting room where we 
received our forgiveness? How have we 
found Him on different parts of the road 
where all earthly lights went out and we 
were left alone with Him? What has Christ 
Jesus been to us? Let us give the world 
our evidence. A bit of vital evidence is 
worth a ton of impersonal creed. ‘‘O what 
shall I do my Saviour to praise?’’ Do 
this; be a witness, and give your evidence. 
‘*How beautiful on the mountains are the 
feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that 
publisheth peace.’’ 


LXVIIlL 
THE LORD’S CHASTENING 


‘*Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’’ 
Hes?) si9).6; 


‘‘LOVETH ... chasteneth.’? The associa- 
tion of the two words is everything. Unite 
them and there is light and hope; divorce 
them and there is darkness and death. To 
bring them together is to relate the vine- 
dresser’s knife to the purple grapes; it lays 
the sharp-toothed harrow side by side with 
the blowing corn. ‘T'o wed love to chasten- 
ing is to put purpose into pain and to give 
direction to seemingly aimless grief. It sets 
a very tender and holy light upon the hori- 
zon, and the light throws its cheering beams 
far down the most desolate way. We are 
told much of what we want to know when 
it is said that chastening is not in the care- 
less hands of brutal chance, but in the firm 
hands of the Lover who is revealed to us 


in Christ. 
259 


260 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


Well, then, there are some seemingly hard 
things in life which do not come from any 
hardness in God. There is a flame which is 
not kindled by anger but by love. It was 
the want of this assurance which burdened 
so many pilgrims who are seen on the Old 
Testament roads. They related the dark 
things in their experience to the displeasure 
of God. They interpreted their shadows as 
His frowns. Their sufferings were regarded 
as the strokes of divine revenge. Adversity 
was a proof of God’s ill-favour. They 
looked upon disappointment as a witness 
that He had forsaken them. Now and again 
a man caught a glimpse of the inner truth 
about things, and it was amazing how it 
transformed his world. Here is one of them 
singing—‘‘In the night His song shall be 
with me.’’ That man is looking at things 
as they really are. He has caught a glimpse 
of the Lover in the blighted garden, and he 
is not afraid. 

The purpose of God’s chastening is not 
punitive but creative. He chastens ‘‘that 
we might be partakers of His holiness.”’ 
The phrase ‘‘that we might be’’ has direc- 
tion in it, and the direction points towards 


THE LORD’S CHASTENING 261 


“i purified and beautiful life. The fire which 
is kindled is not a bonfire, blazing heedlessly 
and unguardedly, and consuming precious 
things; it is a refiner’s fire, and the Refiner 
sits by it, and He is firmly and patiently 
and gently bringing holiness out of careless- 
ness and stability out of weakness. God is 
always creating even when He is using the 
darker means of grace. He is producing 
the fruits and flowers of the spirit. His 
love is always in quest of lovely things. 

Out of all this we may draw a very com- 
forting conclusion; the absence of joy does 
not mean the absence of God. ‘‘No chasten- 
ing for the present seemeth to be joyous, but 
grievous.’’ And yet there are many believ- 
ers who, when the emotion of joy is not beat- 
ing in the heart, interpret it as a sign of 
spiritual lapse and alienation. It is re- 
earded as a severance of the fellowship of 
God. But the pruned vine does not suggest 
an absent vine-dresser, and even if the vine 
be bleeding it does not mean that he has 
gone away. And my emotions may change 
from sorrow to grief, but God remains 
faithful. My fickle moods do not mean a ¢a- 
pricious Friend. Joy will be mine again, 


262 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


and it will be all the richer and the deeper 
because of God’s chastening. His chasten- 
ings are just His ministries for the deepen- 
ing of the soul, for the increase of its recep- 
tiveness; He is seeking the enlargement of 
its capacity for the apprehension of Him- 
self. The April showers bring the May 
flowers. 


LXIX 
ROAD-MAKERS 


‘*Make straight paths for your feet, lest that which 
is lame be turned out of the way.’’—Hep. xii. 13. 


Is there anything more wonderful than a 
well-made road, especially a road which 
hesitates at no eminence, but lays bonds 
upon it, and opens commerce and com- 
munion between distant places! I remem- 
ber one such wonderful road climbing with 
a sort of easy laughter over the Maritime 
Alps. I remember another road which be- 
gins on the Dalmatian coast and subdues the 
fierce mountains which rise between the 
coast and Montenegro. But we need not go 
far away for wonderful roads. A noble 
road crossing some broad British moor is 
extraordinarily impressive; it stretches 
away like a narrowing piece of white ribbon 
and is lost on the horizon, where it suggests 
the unknown and the infinite. 


Horace Bushnell had a fascinating inter- 
263 


264 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


est in roads. It would probably be true to 
say that next to his passion for theology it 
was his dominant passion. And he con- 
nected the two in his thought, and the one 
ministered to the other in the service of in- 
terpretation. He was always planning how 
roads should be made between this place 
and that place, or through a new piece ot 
territory with which he had become ac- 
quainted. But he was something better than 
all this. He was a noble road-maker in 
thought and life. He was a pioneer in bold, 
firm, venturous thinking, and in any fear- 
less way of living which his thought de- 
manded. Any disciple of Bushnell knows 
what a great road-maker he was over per- 
plexing and difficult ground. 

But we are all road-makers. There may 
be no aim and purpose in it, and we may be 
unconscious of our work. Nevertheless, we 
are making roads. We cannot help it. 
Every step we take is the making of a track, 
even if it be only like an uncertain trail 
through a forest. But everybody goes the 
same way many times; acts become habits, 
and what was once a thin trail becomes a 
broad and open road. Yes, we are busy 


ROAD-MAKERS 265 


road-making; every day and every hour we 
are at the work. What kinds of roads are 
we making? Is there anything impressive 
and majestic about them? Do they suggest 
dignity and strength? Are they straight or 
crooked? Can we describe them as fearless 
roads, going right ahead? Or are they wrig- 
gling and deceptive roads, stopping dead at 
the hill, or slinking away I know not where? 
Are we making rough roads, full of loose 
Sharp flints, or smooth roads, where the 
stones have been gathered and every thorn 
removed? What sort of roads are we mak- 
ing? 

Why ask the question? Because some- 
body is following on, and will use our roads. 
And perhaps the one following on is lame, 
or only a poor walker, and the character of 
the road is of infinite concern. Lame, I say. 
Perhaps lame in will and purpose! Or 
lame in desire and self-control! Or Jame in 
affection! And the lame one is perhaps 
your own son, and he is coming down your 
road! What aboutit? Isitallright? Isit 
safe for the son and the family? Is it safe 
for anybody and everybody else? Will they 
stumble on your road? Will they get 


266 LIFE IN THE HEIGHTS 


astray? Will they be pilgrims of the night, 
or pilgrims of the light? Do the roads lead 
into the darkness, or into the dawn? ‘‘Make 
straight paths for your feet;’’ somebody is 
just behind. Make them scrupulously 
straight, and put your best into them, ‘‘lest 
that which is lame be dislocated.’’ 

I was once walking with a good American 
through one of the streets of New York, 
which was in a terrible state of disrepair. 
‘**How is it?”’ I asked. And my friend re- 
plied: ‘‘The stuff that ought to be in that 
road is in the contractor’s pocket.’’ The 
corruption in character had worked itself 
out into the street. And so it is; the roads 
we make are no better than ourselves. 


THE END 


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